OT: U.K. metric?

No, as usual us Brits have our own unique way of doing things!

There was a body formed in the 1970's called the British Metrication Board. They were meant to oversee the transition to metric. However, this was disbanded as a cost-saving move during the years when Mrs Thatcher was PM.

The result is that some industries and organisations are fully metric, some partially, and some still use imperial measurements! Confusing? Oh yes!

Some examples:

Our schools teach only metric measurements. Our roads are signposted in miles, our speed limits use miles per hour, we talk of fuel consumption in miles per gallon. Petrol is sold by the litre, beer by the pint. There are some real anomalies.

All in all it is a mess. We seem to cope OK with it though.

Chris

In alt.autos.ford.focus Vic Dura :

I am not from the U.K., but they use miles and drive on the "wrong" side in opposite to the rest of Europe, which is metric and drives on the "right" lane...;-)

There are various online calculators available, like this one:

Personally use gonvert a small app that seems to know any unit you could imagine, perhaps thousands.

Fun thing about it, usually it is zero problem as anyone in your country will use the same units. On the Internet it starts pretty fast to get annoying.

A simple discussion about something as simple as fuel usage needs conversion tools. I can't imagine much from mpg (miles per gallon) numbers, as others aren't impressed much with l/100km (liters per 100 Kilometer).

Miles per hour are somehow easier, I know offhand that 100 mph are about 160 km/h.

On Sat, 02 Sep 2006 09:30:57 GMT, Chris Whelan wrote Re Re: OT: U.K. metric?:

Thanks Chris. I'm really amazed to read this! Not so much because it is indeed a chaotic mess (we here in the U.S. make a chaotic mess of most things too) but because I've thought the U.K. was metric for the past 40 years.

I derived that assumption from my first car. It was a 1961 Sunbeam Alpine that I bought in 1965. It was metric. Since then, I've always just assumed the U.K. was metric.

Well, I've learned my "something new" for today.

Vic

And do you still bear a grudge against us Vic? :0)

On Sat, 02 Sep 2006 20:23:49 GMT, "Ivan" wrote Re Re: OT: U.K. metric?:

I did, for a long time. But I got over it :-)

Actually I loved that car. It was cold in the winter and it leaked when it rained. But it was easy to work on. The positive ground was a little strange, but I liked the hand crank that came with the car. If the battery was too weak to turn over the engine, I could always start it (during the summer) with the hand crank.

That always blew the minds of any by-standers. One time I had to hand-crank it in Manhattan (New York City) and it drew a small group of interested folks.

After two years I traded it in for a used TR-4.

Ivan wrote

I tend to agree Vic, nostalgia ain't what it used to be.. but having said that, Henry Ford built up his worldwide multi-billion dollar empire on the principle of affordable, reliable, cheap and easy to repair vehicles, in fact exactly the same reason why there are still millions of ancient British designed cars and motorcycles on the roads of India. As I see it, the problem nowadays is that we are in the clutches of the giant Megacorp Industries, whose only interest is to corner the market on overpriced spares and repairs, the days of the small garage down the road who could fix your car for £50 is now an almost distant memory.