This much and no thirstier
The Touraeg V10 TDI, despite being a Volkswagen, is far from being a fuel miser:
NASA’s Saturn V rocket burns fuel at the rate of 20 tons per second. The V10 Touareg isn’t far behind. Volkswagen laughably lists the 5,825-lb SUV’s city mileage at 15 mpg. But there’s a real time fuel economy meter informing the pilot that even gentle acceleration results in a wallet-draining 3.6 mpg. Get this: it won’t display any lower.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll wonder why it won’t display any lower. Fortunately, someone else has already done the math:
Suppose Gunther the on-board fuel computer system programmer (working in metric of course) decided to store the fuel consumption values in milliliters per 100km, and he used a 16-bit integer value. What’s the largest number the thing can handle: 2^16 or 65,535 ml/100km. Translate to US units: 3.6 mpg.
Then again:
Hey, at least it doesn’t crash with an overflow.
We have that much, anyway.
The V10 TDI, incidentally, is a diesel: it gets these un-diesel-like numbers because (1) it’s a V10 fercrissake and (2) it’s got to lug around three tons. For those of us who grew up on teensy VeeDubs of the bug persuasion, this thing inspires a whole lot of ZOMGWTF.
Charles Pergiel »
21 June 2008 · 11:24 pm
“ZOMGWTF isn’t defined yet” in the Urban Dictionary. OMG I get, and WTF, but what the heck is the Z4?
CGHill »
22 June 2008 · 1:00 am
ZOMG is defined here. It is considered to be an intensified version of OMG, though likely not so intense as, say, OMFG.
WTF, of course, needs no introduction.