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Why the heck does America still use outdated measurement and date units?
- Thread starter garirry
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Always both. These days many are digital so you can just choose your preference. Always MPH for me.True. Do cars in Europe show only KPH on the odometer? Cars in the US have both MPH and KPH, so when driving through Canada I just pay attention to the KPH scale. Canadians traveling in the US pay attention to the MPH numbers; otherwise they would be... safely driving under the speed limit
Every car I've driven since I came to the UK had both mph and in inner lettering km/h. With digital dashboards it just switches. The one on my Range Rover then can also show it in mph at the same time as well. The Polestar / Android Automative Operating System switches automatically iirc.True. Do cars in Europe show only KPH on the odometer? Cars in the US have both MPH and KPH, so when driving through Canada I just pay attention to the KPH scale. Canadians traveling in the US pay attention to the MPH numbers; otherwise they would be... safely driving under the speed limit
The one thing that doesn't switch automatically is Apple Carplay
It could be for mainland cars, I have to be honest and its been so long ago that I've driven an older one that I honestly can't remember.
In the UK, a mph country firstly, there have been dual scales for a long time.
My daughter's 1987 VW Golf MK2 GTI had it already, as does her 1990 BMW E30.
I'm from the States but have spent most of my adult life in Europe. When I speak English units are naturally in Miles and Fahrenheit, but when I speak Swedish I use Kilometers and Centigrade.
Your daughter is a person of exquisite taste. At least in my book.
I found this pic of my own car which is already almost 10 years old (2014). I probably decided to remember a particularly hot night (90.5 F for all
). A night in August in case it isn't also clear .
There is something quite not very European about it and it's my first as some will quickly spot.
I have never driven a car with two scales
.
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LOL Yes, when she turned 16 she was like I would love at Golf MK2 GTI as my first car opposed to some Toyota Yaris 1.0 anonymous thing. And I was smiling and thinking that my wife and I did something right
Bless her, I taught her to drive in it with a broken gear shift linkage, and an engine that wouldn't idle. All fixed and perfect now, but that was good experience as she can drive anything now 🤣That looks like the semi digital BMW dashboard, very similar to what my wife had in her BMW M2C. Interesting, yes UK cars have the dual scale, but the mainland ones then don't always (unless a fully digital dash…). I never realised that.I found this pic of my own car. I probably decided to remember a particularly hot night (90.5 F for all
There is something quite not very European about it and it's my first as some will quickly spot.
Exactly, you can even easily spot the similarities with for exemple the 90s E30. It's on night mode so the colours are a bit blander.
We have to get to 18 for a driving license, now it's 18 everything, in my time was 18 driving and voting, 16 drinking (not that anyone really checked).
Learning is done on a driving school car. I got a particularly ran down Polo. One class the thing stopped working and I asked what had I done wrong "nothing, go outside and push". More learning I guess. Next lesson an Opel Corsa showed up. Vauxhall for all our Bristish friends.
We have to get to 18 for a driving license, now it's 18 everything, in my time was 18 driving and voting, 16 drinking (not that anyone really checked).
Learning is done on a driving school car. I got a particularly ran down Polo. One class the thing stopped working and I asked what had I done wrong "nothing, go outside and push". More learning I guess. Next lesson an Opel Corsa showed up. Vauxhall for all our Bristish friends.
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Yup, it changed, in the Netherlands it was OK to get a drink at 16. When I asked for a beer for my other daughter last summer, there was a rather stern response asking how old she was. I proudly said 16, and the waitress said she can't have one. It is 18 there now as well. So we went across the border to Belgium the following evening.
In the UK you can start learning to drive when you are 17, and early on the morning of her 17th birthday we went for the first lesson in the forest where it was nice and quiet.
I was lucky, my driving instructor in the Netherlands has a Mercedes 190 it was nice and comfortable.
Might be conditioning but i'm used to MPH when it comes to driving. And its always strange switching to KPH in certain countries.
Farenheit is something i've simply given up on learning. The formula never made sense to me, so i just stick to Centigrade.
I also like to set my clock to 12h, apparently this is a no no. But i'm not in the military so...meh.
Everywhere else i use metric.
My old Lexus had dual scales
My current car has a single scale...albeit can be changed as it has a digital speedo. The none digital speedo again has a dual scale.
Farenheit is something i've simply given up on learning. The formula never made sense to me, so i just stick to Centigrade.
I also like to set my clock to 12h, apparently this is a no no. But i'm not in the military so...meh.
Everywhere else i use metric.
My old Lexus had dual scales
My current car has a single scale...albeit can be changed as it has a digital speedo. The none digital speedo again has a dual scale.
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I like to adjust my speedometer to whatever countries speed limit signs are in. I mean, I'd love to see a sign for 130 when in France and drive 130mph (ca. 209 km/h), but I know it is wrong, and don't want to have to make the mental translation of what 130 km/h is in mph.
Having grown up in the U.S., to American parents, but who’s lived in Canada for most of my adult life, my friends locally have gotten used to hearing me say stuff like, “degrees freedom” for “°F”, and “Kansas grams” for “oz” (as in, “16 Kansas grams equals one Liberal”, or “lb” — literally the name of a city in Kansas).
Then again, I wake every morning and look forward to freshly brewed hot brown bean water.
Then again, I wake every morning and look forward to freshly brewed hot brown bean water.
LOL almost a version of cockney rhyming slang except it doesn’t rhyme.
Imagine all of it spoken with a southern U.S. drawl. Y’all.
I learned last year that bald eagles sounds like seagulls😐, not what the media portrays in movies and tv.😒 That sound is the call of the red-tailed hawk. The bald eagle is the Mike Tyson of the bird world: big, intimidating, dangerous but that voice.😑
Another myth, not borne by science, is the bald eagle is a “brave” apex predator. In reality, they’re scavengers of carrion and they engage in kleptoparasitism — that is, they steal food from predators which did the actual kill. Only in exceptional conditions will an adult bald eagle resort to being a predator, but only when the other alternatives are unavailable. Juveniles, on the other hand, won’t prey on living animals.
In this sense, bald eagles’ routine behaviour around food sources is closer to a vulture than, say, a hawk.
That kleptoparasitism thing, tho… 👀
Beautiful interior, specially the manual transmission shifter (I enjoyed driving manual). But the only problem is that I would have to sit on the passenger seat in order to drive it 😁
~just kidding with you, but I did get confused with the layout of the steering wheel and shifter for a second or two.
A lot of other birds do the same as eagles, and so wolves, bears, and so on. Ravens (craws), seagulls, and so on scavenge "road kill" (animals that are killed by automobiles). But eagles, ravens, seagulls do pray on fish and live small animals (rodents, etc.), and steal food from each other as well. Just like humans, other animals, fish, birds scavenge for survival, and even prey on each other. Yes, yes, I understand that it sounds "grotesco"
By the way, I have seen ospreys scavenging "road kill" in Alaska.
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That BMW: What a gorgeous, visually clear and clean, mercifully uncluttered, and extremely legible dash; a design classic.
Makers of screen-based tech UIs should take heed: physical tacility of actual interface features, without a need to move one’s eyes from where the attention is absolutely required, still has a place and should never be underestimated or cut out from the equation.
Doing so is a veritable sacrifice of one sensory mode of interaction with another mode entirely — as farcical as using the sense of taste to substitute hearing. In the case of vehicular dash controls, it’s basically two senses — touch and proprioception — being tossed out in favour for glass UIs with “haptic” response: the haptics become meaningless once sight gets removed from the equation.
Well said.
On cars, I must say that I love the tactile feeling of dials, knobs, and stalks that you can push, twist and turn, and I love to see proper and reassuringly solid analogue instruments, rather than a touch screen - (I detest them even on phones), on the dashboard of a car.
This isn't just about aesthetics (though it includes that) but, also, about ergonomics.