SOLUTION: You are trying to decide which of two cars to buy. The first is American-made, costs $14,500 and has a rated fuel consumption of 28 miles/gal. The second car is of European manuf

Question 1042873: You are trying to decide which of two cars to buy. The first is American-made, costs
$14,500 and has a rated fuel consumption of 28 miles/gal. The second car is of
European manufacture, costs $21,700 and has a rated fuel consumption of 19 km/L. If
the cost of fuel is $0.85/gal and if the cars actually deliver their rated fuel consumption,
estimate how many km you would have to drive for the lower fuel consumption of the
second car to compensate for the higher cost of this car?

Found 2 solutions by josmiceli, Theo:
Answer by josmiceli(19441) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
45.05245.052Convert miles to km and gallons to liters
km
L
----------------------------
Convert mi/gal to km/L
km/L
and convert $/gal to $/L
$/L
--------------------------
Note that:
( $/L ) / ( km/L ) = $/km, and then
$/km * km = $
Let = number of km driven by both cars
Set the costs of operation equal to each other

So, the car costing $21,700 would have to be driven
1,043,479 km to compensate for it's higher cost
( I added 1 more km )
---------------------
check:

looks OK -check my math & maybe get another opinion
Answer by Theo(13342) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
your solution is that the cost for the american car is equal to the cost for the european car when they have both traveled 1,022,019.993 kilometers.
that's 1 million, 22 thousand, 19.993 kilometers.
divide kilometers by 1.60934 to get an equivalent 635,055.36 miles.
that's a lot of miles, but then again, the cost per gallon is very cheap.
.85 per gallon is a lot cheaper than 3.00 per gallon, which it is today.

if you said that the cost of fuel is .85 per liter, then that might have made more sense in today's environment because .85 * 3.78541 = 3.2175985 per gallon which is a lot closer to what it is today.

but you said .85 per liter and i worked the problem that way.

a picture of the worksheet i used is shown below:

if i use 3.2175985 per gallon, then i get .85 per liter and the number of kilometers changes as follows:

break even point becomes 269,989.2463 kilometers.
divide that by 1.60934 kilometers per mile to get an equivalent 167,763 miles.

that's still a lot of miles, but it's a lot more believable since most cars nowadays will get you somewhere between 100,000 miles and 200,000 miles of travel before they need major overhauls.

a picture of the revised worksheet i used is shown below:

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