Mi/L to Km/L
1 mile per liter equals 1.609344 kilometers per liter exactly.
How to convert miles per liter to kilometers per liter
To convert miles per liter to kilometers per liter, multiply the number of miles per liter by 1.609344. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilometers per liter by 0.6213711922 (rounded).
kilometers per liter = miles per liter × 1.609344
Example: 10 miles per liter = 16.09344 kilometers per liter.
Miles per gallon rises as a car gets more efficient, while liters per 100 km falls. The conversion between them is a reciprocal (for US mpg: L/100 km = 235.215 ÷ mpg).
About these units
Mile Per Liter (mi/L)
Miles traveled on one liter of fuel.
Where cars are sold with distances in miles and fuel in liters, the natural measure of efficiency is miles per liter. It is a hybrid of the two systems, and the sources consulted do not show it as a standard labelling unit. Metric countries normally quote liters per 100 kilometers or kilometers per liter, while the United States uses miles per US gallon and the United Kingdom still quotes miles per imperial gallon.
Converting is straightforward because a mile is defined as exactly 1.609344 kilometers, so one mile per liter equals 1.609344 kilometers per liter. In the other direction, one kilometer per liter is about 0.621 miles per liter. Against gallon-based figures the multiplier is the gallon size: an imperial gallon is 4.54609 liters, so one mile per liter is about 4.546 miles per imperial gallon, and the US gallon of about 3.785 liters gives about 3.785 miles per US gallon. A car that returns 10 miles per liter would therefore cover roughly 45 miles on an imperial gallon, and in the usual metric form it would burn 100 divided by 16.09, or just over 6.2 liters per 100 kilometers.
1 mile per liter = 1.609344 kilometers per liter (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Fuel economy in automobiles; NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8 conversion factors
Kilometer Per Liter (km/L)
Distance traveled on one liter of fuel. The standard way to quote fuel economy in India, Japan, Brazil and much of Asia.
Kilometres per litre is the most literal way to ask how far a car goes on a given amount of fuel. It is a direct measure of fuel economy, so higher is better, and it sits between the two systems that dominate the world: miles per gallon and litres per 100 km. The sources I found do not credit any specific inventor or date for it; it is simply the metric counterpart to miles per gallon, formed by dividing distance by volume in the units a country already used for roads and fuel.
Wikipedia lists India, Japan and South Korea among the places that quote economy in km/L. A conversion shows how it relates to US figures: 1 km/L is about 2.35 mpg (US), so 10 km/L is roughly 23.5 mpg (US), in the same range as the average new US vehicle of the 2020 model year, which was about 25.4 mpg. The Levant has its own variant, kilometres per 20 litres, based on the size of a common fuel container called a tanaka.
The kilometer per liter is the reference unit for fuel economy on this site.
Sources: Wikipedia: Fuel economy in automobiles; Wikipedia: Imperial gallon
Related conversions
- Km/L to mi/L (reverse)
- Mi/L to MPG (US)
- Mi/L to MPG (UK)
- Mi/L to L/100 km
- MPG (US) to km/L
- MPG (UK) to km/L
- L/100 km to km/L
- Gal/100 mi (US) to km/L
- Gal/100 mi (UK) to km/L
- L/mil to km/L
See all fuel economy units.