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In America we say the fuel economy of car as miles/gallon (miles per gallon). I know in some countries people use Liter/100 km (liter per 100 km). Some countries use km/Liter (km per liter).

My question is: which format Germany people use?

L/100 km or km/L?

Thanks.

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In Germany it's definitely l/100 km (note that Liter is abbreviated with a lowercase l). (I'd say that in most of western Europe it's that way, maybe different in the UK.)

To clarify: according to wikipedia the UK also uses mpg, but due to different definitions of gallon, american mpg are different than british mpg. And as far as I know noone in the world uses km/l - it's either mpg (US or UK) or l/100 km, but this is from my personal experience and may be wrong.

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    Note that accordingly the measure is usually not labelled something meaning ‘fuel economy’ or ‘motor efficiency’ in German, but Verbrauch ‘consumption’ (often found in compounds like Spritverbrauch, Benzinverbrauch, Kraftstoffverbrauch). Officially, uppercase ‘L’ is an accepted alternative symbol for liter, but it’s rarely found in German texts and labels.
    – Crissov
    Commented Mar 20, 2016 at 20:44
  • See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litre#Symbol for l vs. L.
    – chirlu
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 15:06
  • The upper-/lowercase is thing is starting to develop into a thread on its own :-) The Duden (duden.de/rechtschreibung/Liter) only mentions the lowercase "L"
    – Thomas
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 15:38
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If you buy a car, you will get l/100km indications, possibly separated according to usage scenario.

If you rent a car (possibly due to international harmonization) the km per liter specification is possible if not likely, see

here

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    Nice find, never encountered this and would've bet on a localization bug.
    – hiergiltdiestfu
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 16:36
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In addition, l/100 km can be applied with respect to a region (like in town, out of town).

Kraftstoffverbrauch innerorts, l/100 km: 6,6 - 6,5
Kraftstoffverbrauch außerorts, l/100 km: 4,7 - 4,6
Kraftstoffverbrauch kombiniert, l/100 km: 5,4 - 5,3

Source: A German car

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