this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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So why 100 km and not some other arbitrary number?
Because most of the world already uses L/100 km currently for gas powered cars.
Huh, til
My guess, because it works fine for fuel. The result is a number that is easy to read, e.g. 5 or 10 liters per 100 km.
Sure, we could also pick other numbers, but 100 works well.
The ease for calculating my estimated distance or energy usage based on units of distance per 1 kWh is so much easier. I say that because I would bet most cars on the highway go a distance not evenly divisible by 100 km on a total charge. The 65 kWh pack on my Bolt EUV makes it easy to calculate total distance with just a simple multiplication instead of division. 3.9 mi/kWh is 253.5 miles per charge (6.21 km/kWh is 403.65 km per charge) is a much more useful metric for calculating legs for planning charge spots.
kWh is already a cursed unit, having multiples of a unit per multiples of another unit feels even more cursed.
This is some superfluous american argument, you grew up with MPG, so MPKWH is closer to what you are used to.
i drive a lot, I don't ever calculate my remaining range in my head, it's on the car, and it's a guesstimate, even for ICE cars, BEVs just more erratic as the change in driving style matters more.
What I care about is my long term consumption per 100km, then I can easily calculate my consumption over 1000 or 10 000km and then I know the long term running costs of the car.
The only time I use the km per liter is when I back check the consumption, i.e car says I went 820kms since last refueling then I refill to full and calculate if the average fuel consumption shown to me is accurate.
Per 100 units are also much more intuitive, lower number means lower consumption, as opposed to higher number meaning lower consumption.
But as I said, this is at this point mostly a cultural difference, if you told me a car does 5kms for 1 kwh, I would have no idea what that means realistically, if you tell me it consumes 10kwh per 100km, that means I can immediately calculate how much it will cost me to drive 100kms and then 1000, 10000, 100 000, as it is a simple multiplication by 10.
It's the only measurement like that in all of my dealings AFAIK. RPM, hertz, watts, amps, velocity, are all things that we deal with on the daily that are expressed as number of things per 1 unit of something. When charging, out and about, calculating how long I need to stay plugged in to get to a certain SoC is calculated out by the hour on level 2 chargers (not fast enough to bump up against the charge curve so the charge rate is practically linear). Even paying for fuel is listed as currency per 1 L (or gal here in the US).
Here's my usage so far for the year:
Even then, I want to measure that in terms of cost so multiplying that number by my rate is how to calculate the long term cost which is still currency per 1 kWh. Which for me works out to $371 for the year on charging at home.