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First World Problems: Display Range or Battery % but not both....?

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No, I did mean inaccurate. Every gas gauge I have owned has had significant nonlinearity. Inaccurate.
Every new car i have seen shows miles. None show percent.

Haha yeah... all my cars always show full for the first 250ish miles and then drop to empty in the next 100 miles. I mean.. what's the point... just have a light that says "fuel low" at that point.
 
I'm not sure about car gas gauges, but in the aviation industry, the standard tolerance was only that the gas gauge be accurate at EMPTY. Everything above empty was not guaranteed and many planes I flew had significant non-linearity. I've found great non-linearity in my ICE gas gauges as well...with the exception of German cars which seem to be really accurate. American cars seem to be the worst with a car having as much as 2 gallons of usable gas left after the gas gauge reads empty. Have heard (but more of an Old Wives Tail) that US Car Makers make it that way so that people don't run out of gas...
 
I think you'll find my comment was accurate and your assumption was it imprecise. :)

If you wish further explanation as to why the "pictorial graph" you described is a percentage display, speak to me privately.


I see what you're getting at, @Mediocrates - but "percent" literally indicates describing 100ths; while someone may say "I gotta get gas, I'm down to a quarter tank," it's not likely they'd say "... I'm down to 25%." I've only seen (edit) larger fractions on fuel gauges as you pointed out.

This is why I initially described the concept of precision, since the murky colloquial usage of precision/accuracy leads to a lot of confusion. Couple that with the mathematical nuances of fractions/percentages, which most people tend to not retain post-education, and we have many who continue to struggle with reconciling their casual/colloquial perspectives of how all of these gauges display information.

And you're right, people don't realize they've been thinking in percentages when they say something like "down to a quarter tank." I want people to realize they've always been operating in percentages, and they are still capable of doing it (even if they choose to display range in their vehicle as estimated distance).


No, I did mean inaccurate. Every gas gauge I have owned has had significant nonlinearity. Inaccurate.

If you wish further explanation regarding precision versus accuracy, speak to me privately.


Every new car i have seen shows miles. None show percent.

If you wish further explanation as to how pretty much every gas gauge you've ever seen is a percentage display, speak to me privately.
 
If you wish further explanation as to why the "pictorial graph" you described is a percentage display, speak to me privately..

I think you’re getting hung up that all displays of ratios (some might say fractions but that implies less than the whole which is a special case) are percentages, whereas a percentage figure is just a single number representation of a ratio. Therefore a percentage is the display of a ratio, but not all displays of ratios are in percents. What we see in the car is the ratio of state of charge to full and not an absolute amount, I believe that’s your point, but the battery icon is not in itself a % display, its the representation of a something that could also be displayed as a percentage. That’s my accurate and now very precise explanation.

The earlier point about the difference between accurate and precise was a good one.
 
I think you’re getting hung up that all displays of ratios (some might say fractions but that implies less than the whole which is a special case) are percentages, whereas a percentage figure is just a single number representation of a ratio. Therefore a percentage is the display of a ratio, but not all displays of ratios are in percents.

Yes! You've reasoned to the penultimate conclusion in the process, and I hope your explanation is helping people understand that they have been "thinking percentage" the whole time.