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Japanese Mileage Maniacs

Posted by Zonk on from the where-did-they-get-those-wonderful-toys dept.

WY writes "Bloomberg reports on the quirky world of Japanese hybrid car hackers: 'Toyota Motor Corp. says its Prius gasoline-electric hybrid car gets about 55 miles to the gallon, making it one of the most fuel-efficient cars on the road. That's not good enough for Takashi Toya.' He managed to reach as high as 115 MPG. He is one of about 100 nenpimania, Japanese for mileage maniacs."

1 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mileage? by darkitecture · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Don't they use kilometers there?

    Well if you want to get that technical, yes we use kilometers here. But even in English speaking countries, mileage is commonly used because "kilometrage" would just sound silly. Mileage or simply "fuel efficiency" is acceptable.

    But just for the pedantic, the japanese characters for "nenpi" (I'd type them here but Slashdot doesn't seem to accept Japanese characters) are literally translated as the character for "burn" (On reading of 'nen') and the character for "cost" or "consumption" (On reading of 'hi' or in this case, 'pi'). Mileage is just the (American) English equivalent. Fuel consumption would probably be more widely accepted.