this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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The mathematics I have to go through at fuel stations that don't allow paying at the pump, gotta go inside and talk to the cashier, ugh.
Each tenth of my tank is 2.4 gallons, so if I'm at 4/10 and want to top off, (10-4)=6, so 6 x 2.4 = 14.4 gallons x price of fuel per gallon which is hovering around $6.90 lately (diesel in California), so I tell the cashier person I 'd like to purchase exactly $99.36 but gosh that's so close to $100 let's just round it to $100.
Remarkable how USian measurements always make people jump through some hoops. On my dashboard, I'd just see that the tank is missing about thirty liters of gas, so I'd get thirty liters. That was a car from the eighties, so we aren't talking any fancy electronics, either.
Most cars don't show that. Here's the fuel gauge from my backup car since my other car is in the middle of repairs
Not only do you have to know the size of the tank, you also have to account for fuel tank math being different from regular math. The needle isn't linear. E.g in a lot of cars it doesn't start dropping until you're down at least like 5 liters. That's because people start whining about fuel consumption otherwise ("I just filled up and it's already dropping") and similarly the last half or quarter seems to be bigger in some cars. Middle bit is worth the least.
I don't think I've seen a car that actually shows the liters. Maybe once or twice. I've owned like 10 or 15 cars and driven many more.
I thought for a minute that I misremembered, since image search shown only gauges like yours. But, here's what it looks like in an old Volkswagen. Admittedly my car experience is very limited since I only bought it for fun and then discovered I just don't have much need for a car. I guess most cars use the relative-scale gauges so that the instrument is interchangeable between models.
Yes but the cashier wants us to tell her a monetary amount. It has nothing to do with USA using gallons instead of litres. It's a matter of multiplying money amount times unit of volume of desired fuel.
Hm, that's still an odd system, to me. Around here, the cash register does the multiplication, and I probably wouldn't be trusted to say the correct sum (nor would I want to). Never tried that, though — it might be possible to do it that way.
What I'm describing is not exclusive to the USA. It's just how fuel purchases are made when paying at the pump isn't an option, so you have to go in & do the transaction with a human behind a Point-of-Sale machine. The person at the cash register doesn't know how many gallons or liters you need. So you have to tell them. But they want to know the corresponding cash amount, not the volume of liquid. So you have to do the math yourself in order to tell them the dollar amount to charge to your card. 🤷🏼♀️ I don't know how to make this any clearer.
I understand that. It just seems backwards to me. In a shop, I don't ask for X bucks of meat, but for Y kilograms of it, and they charge me a certain sum. Same with gas stations.
You can usually go back in and get change, or the balance refunded.
Well yeah but I still need to tell her a dollar amount. If I underestimate then my tank won't get topped off. So I have to do the math.