3 ms·

You mean the British-built one? I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. Fuel is sold in litres but consumption measured in m

You mean the British-built one? I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. Fuel is sold in litres but consumption measured in miles per gallon. Milk is sold in 1 pint or 2/4/6 litre bottles. Road signs to towns are in miles but in roadworks are in metres. And so on.

GordonS 7y ago
To add to the mix, some signs are in yards - who even knows what one of those equals these days?!
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Yards are the easiest to translate. A yard is roughly a meter (~9/10's).
- GordonS 7y ago
  I don't usually complain about downvote... but seriously? Someone really thinks it's OK to have signs in all of miles, metres and yards?!
angrygoat 7y ago
Yeah, the strange half-transition to metric in the UK is really odd. I'm from Australia, another Commonwealth country, and we're -entirely- metric here. The only thing I can think of is that people still talk about height of people in feet and inches, but on official forms it's in centimetres. I wonder why the UK couldn't quite make the jump over? At least the US has agreed that the Moon is a metric only zone! https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/08jan_metricmoon/ https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/0...
justin66 7y ago
> I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. McLaren recently failed to qualify for the Indy 500 (McLaren!) due in part to a unit conversion problem made prior to the last day of qualifying. https://autoweek.com/article/indy-500/mclaren-ceo-zak-brown-indy-500-debacle-we-made-so-many-mistakes https://autoweek.com/article/indy-500/mclaren-ceo-zak-brown-...
- magduf 7y ago
  To be fair, from my reading of the article, this was a metric-to-imperial conversion problem, meaning McLaren was used to working in metric, but the Indy 500 is in the USA, which uses the backwards and archaic US customary units, so someone screwed up in converting to those. This could have happened to any non-American racing team, and doesn't serve at all as an example of Brits sticking with obsolete units, but rather the opposite. It does seem that McLaren made a lot of boneheaded mistakes here, but this example just doesn't go with the "Brits are still using imperial units" theme of this thread at all.

GordonS 7y ago

To add to the mix, some signs are in yards - who even knows what one of those equals these days?!

merpnderp 7y ago
Yards are the easiest to translate. A yard is roughly a meter (~9/10's).
GordonS 7y ago
I don't usually complain about downvote... but seriously? Someone really thinks it's OK to have signs in all of miles, metres and yards?!

angrygoat 7y ago

Yeah, the strange half-transition to metric in the UK is really odd. I'm from Australia, another Commonwealth country, and we're -entirely- metric here. The only thing I can think of is that people still talk about height of people in feet and inches, but on official forms it's in centimetres. I wonder why the UK couldn't quite make the jump over? At least the US has agreed that the Moon is a metric only zone! https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/08jan_metricmoon/ https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/0...

justin66 7y ago

> I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. McLaren recently failed to qualify for the Indy 500 (McLaren!) due in part to a unit conversion problem made prior to the last day of qualifying. https://autoweek.com/article/indy-500/mclaren-ceo-zak-brown-indy-500-debacle-we-made-so-many-mistakes https://autoweek.com/article/indy-500/mclaren-ceo-zak-brown-...

magduf 7y ago
To be fair, from my reading of the article, this was a metric-to-imperial conversion problem, meaning McLaren was used to working in metric, but the Indy 500 is in the USA, which uses the backwards and archaic US customary units, so someone screwed up in converting to those. This could have happened to any non-American racing team, and doesn't serve at all as an example of Brits sticking with obsolete units, but rather the opposite. It does seem that McLaren made a lot of boneheaded mistakes here, but this example just doesn't go with the "Brits are still using imperial units" theme of this thread at all.