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Comment by GFischer | Hacker News Reader

There's a Volkswagen Gol here in Uruguay with a million kilometers, and it's not an unheard-of amount

Cars are the most expensive in the world here, so we tend to keep then way long past their expiration date - as an example, I own a 1994 Maruti with 200.000 km, they aren't designed to last that long ! Japanese cars are the most coveted because they do last a million kilometers if cared for properly.

Sadly, there's a ban on used car imports (The vice-president's campaign was funded by the new cars importer association).

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A million kilometers is considerably less than a million miles. A million kilometers is about 621 thousand miles. That's a lot, but it's much less than a million miles.

Do you seriously believe there is any regular reader of Hacker News that doesn't know that a kilometre is less than a mile?

With my comment, I just wanted to add one more anecdotal point :)

I'm aware of the difference between miles and km (though I instinctively tend to minimize it and believe the difference is less than it really is)

I know of that Volkswagen because a million km is headline-grabbing here (on the "anecdotes" section), there are probably cars with a million miles but 1,609,344 km is not a headline-significant number, much like 621,371 miles isn't for the US.

(This is more in response to Sunbeam)

I did actually find this quite helpful, as a Canadian I usually gloss over the km/mile conversion with a nice 1 km ~= 1 mile, as with most things you talk about (speed < 60, distances less than 100) the difference is fairly miniscule (and handwavey!). I didn't realize 1million miles is only 621,000 km! Thanks from an ignorant Canadian :)

As another Canadian, it's annoying to have you link your ignorance to your nationality. I'm confident that the vast majority of Canadians know that a mile is, very roughly, around 50% longer than a kilometer.

And if you think the difference is miniscule in normal usage, you just try driving 59 MILES per hour on a city street with a 50km/h limit, and see how the cops feel about that. (I say 59 because my lived experience is that everyone drives 10 over, and the cops don't ticket at 9 over; your city may vary)

Or try estimating when you're going to arrive at a meeting that's 100 MILES away on the highway, when you think "oh, 100 km, I can go 110 on the highway, plus the time to get out the door, call it an hour".

Even at walking speeds, 2 miles of walking is going to feel different than 2 km of walking.

Edit: PS, who's Sunbeam?

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