Why is using kilometers to quote Jupiter's orbital distance considered cumbersome?

It results in long strings of zeros, making communication slow and error-prone.

The primary reason for moving away from quoting vast distances in kilometers within the solar system is the impracticality of handling large numerical strings. For instance, Jupiter's average distance is over 778 million kilometers. When communications, textbooks, or quick comparisons require reciting or referencing numbers with multiple zeros, such as 778,000,000 km, the chance for transcription errors increases significantly, and the information is difficult to recall or digest quickly. The AU converts this massive figure into a concise value (5.2 AU), allowing researchers and educators to grasp the scale intuitively without being burdened by extensive digit counts.