Common motoring terms

Find out what these common motoring terms mean

MPG (miles per gallon)

MPG stands for miles per gallon - that is, how far you can travel on a single gallon of fuel.

For example, if you travel 35 miles and use a gallon of petrol to do that, then your MPG is 35.

You can often find your MPG in your car’s trip computer on the dashboard. Using your car’s actual MPG in the advanced options will give you a more accurate result.

Gallon

In the UK, a gallon is an imperial measurement of liquid. We use it when talking about miles per gallon (MPG), because miles are also an imperial measurement.

A UK gallon is 4.546 litres - different from a US gallon, which is 3.785 litres.

Pence per litre

Simply put, pence per litre is how many pence you pay for a litre of fuel - it is the price you see listed at petrol station forecourts up and down the UK.

We use pence rather than pounds for two reasons:

• to allow for a more precise price, hence you often see .9 or .7 at the end
• it is a marketing trick: 135.9p feels cheaper than £1.36, even though we can all convert it easily enough!

Pence per litre can be written in a number of ways, but in the UK we commonly drop the “per litre” and just put a p after the price - e.g. 135.9p

Whilst we drive in miles and measure MPG in miles per gallon, we buy and sell fuel in litres - just one of the many quirks of weights and measures in UK life!

As the crow flies

This phrase is an English saying that is the same as measuring the straight line distance between two points.

Imagine you’re a bird flying above the UK. To get from point A to point B you would fly in a straight line between them, rather than following roads and footpaths. That’s all it means, we just happened to use a crow for the bird!