Convert liters to gallons

The formula

gallons = liters × 0.26417205

liters to gallons — quick reference

Which gallon matters more here than anywhere else in metric conversion

The US gallon is 3.785 litres and the imperial gallon is 4.546 — about a fifth apart, far too much to shrug at. A 60-litre fuel tank is 15.9 US gallons or 13.2 imperial. The imperial gallon has not been legal for trade in Britain since 1995 and fuel has been sold in litres for decades, so a British figure quoted in gallons is usually historic, conversational, or about fuel economy.

That last case is where the two gallons still collide daily. Vehicle specifications, motoring journalism and owners' forums quote consumption in miles per gallon without naming which gallon, leaving the reader to infer it from the publication. Getting it wrong flatters or damns a car by twenty per cent.

Fuel economy cannot be converted with this factor at all

A car returning 40 mpg in a British magazine is doing about 33 mpg by American reckoning — same car, same fuel, different gallon. Nothing has changed but the denominator, which is why cross-border arguments about which market gets the more efficient engines are so often measuring nothing.

The deeper trap is litres per 100 kilometres, the figure European manufacturers actually publish. It measures consumption rather than economy, so it runs the other way — lower is better — and it cannot be turned into miles per gallon by multiplying anything, because the relationship is a reciprocal. Six litres per 100 km is roughly 39 mpg US and 47 mpg imperial.

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