Do Car Companies Give Some Countries Better Warranties?

 
Not all countries use the same units of measure, so companies make changes to their advertisements so that their products are more easily understood by the people reading them.  Hyundai sells cars all over the world and is proud of their powertrain warranty which protects the engine, transmission, and other parts that make the car drive.  Hyundai offers a 100,000 mile powertrain warranty in the United States and a 100,000 kilometer powertrain warranty in Canada.
 

• Which warranty allows you to drive further?
• How could you make the warranties fairer?

 

These questions may be useful in helping students down the problem solving path:

• What information would be useful in figuring this out?
• What factors may affect your answer’s accuracy?

 

My goal was to find two countries that appeared to have the same warranties except for different units so that students would think they were not different. The best I could find had a different number of years but with the 100,000 miles/kilometers. The challenge question was picked with the hope that the different number of years would be ignored. My hope is that after students realize that the warranties are not the same, they will figure out which warranty is better and realize that understanding math will help consumers make better choices.
 

• Hyundai United States Warranty

• Hyundai Canada Warranty

 

• CCSS 6.RP.1 – Understand the concept of a ratio and use ratio language to describe a ratio relationship between two quantities. For example, “The ratio of wings to beaks in the bird house at the zoo was 2:1, because for every 2 wings there was 1 beak.” “For every vote candidate A received, candidate C received nearly three votes.”
• CCSS 6.RP.2 – Understand the concept of a unit rate a/b associated with a ratio a:b with b ≠ 0, and use rate language in the context of a ratio relationship. For example, “This recipe has a ratio of 3 cups of flour to 4 cups of sugar, so there is 3/4 cup of flour for each cup of sugar.” “We paid $75 for 15 hamburgers, which is a rate of $5 per hamburger.”
• CCSS 6.RP.3 – Use ratio and rate reasoning to solve real-world and mathematical problems, e.g., by reasoning about tables of equivalent ratios, tape diagrams, double number line diagrams, or equations.

 

• Hyundai Canada
• Hyundai United States