What's the average of 5 MPG and 10 MPG?
The math isn't quite obvious to me, but if you go out camping and get 5 MPG on the way to the campground and turn around and get 10 MGP on the way back, your average MPG won't be 7.5 as you would expe...
Forum Discussion
holstein13 wrote:
The math isn't quite obvious to me, but if you go out camping and get 5 MPG on the way to the campground and turn around and get 10 MGP on the way back, your average MPG won't be 7.5 as you would expect. It's actually 6.67.
In other words, you used two thirds of your fuel on the way up and one third on the way back.
Which gets me to thinking, why don't we simply use fuel consumption (i.e. gallons per hundred miles) instead of miles per gallon? It would be much easier to compare mileage if we did so.
On edit: I'm not complaining about fuel mileage at all. This is a theoretical situation, not an actual report of MPGs. I'm just commenting on how odd it is that you can't average MPGs together.
What Old Biscuit said.
