What's the most commonly broken speed limit?
I bet it's 30mph.
So why do so many new cars have speedos that don't show 30?
20, 40, 60, 80 etc, but not 30.
There are lots of 50mph limits on our roads and even more at 70mph, both of which are also missing.
My other gripe is speedos numbered to a pointless 160mph, which means the real world numbers you do need to use are too close together.
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Another gripe is kilometre makings in red on a black background e.g. some Ford models. These can be virtually impossible to read unless the sun is falling directly onto the face of the dial.
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Specsavers?
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20, 40 60 doesn't bother me that much - my Audi has this, but they are well spaced.
What bothers me is speedos reading to 180mph. The latest Audis have 20,40,60 etc, but the first quarter of the speedo is reading 80mph, in the UK three quarters of the speedo is redundant.
The 20 figures are also close to the 30 mark due to there not being enough room for mph and kph.
With modern electronics there's no reason for the needle to read up to 100mph, then a digital speedo take over.
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...speedos reading to 180mph...
You wouldn't reach that if you drove it off a cliff. :)
Isn't the terminal velocity of a falling heavy object roughly 120mph?
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I think the 120 mph terminal velocity applies to the average human body, e.g. skydivers.
Ignoring air resistance, a cliff 1100 feet high would give an object 180 mph. Streamlined heavy objects like Barnes Wallis's Tallboy bombs went supersonic from 20,000 feet I think.
Maybe Top Gear or Brainiac could be persuaded to drop an old Audi from a great hieght and finf out how fast it would go :-)
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A derestricted RS4, RS6 will do over 155mph, that's why new Audis have silly speedos - someone will deristrict and have a trip on the autobhan!
As a result of this all new Audis, regardless of potential top speed have the same speedo - crazy.
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Another thing that's silly is the marking of rev counters in x100 values, which means they can get confused with speedos, as the numbers are in 10's.
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I sold a car to a silly person who'd never seen a rev counter before.
We came down a restricted 30MPH road in fifth with her doing 3kRPM!
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Don't Octavias have speedos that are graduated in 10s to about 80mph, then 20s after that ? Sounds a sensible option for the 180mph overpriced VWs, I mean Audis.
Edited by Lygonos on 15/02/2009 at 00:44
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My Chrysler managed to avoid this problem; speedo tops out at 85. 45 is the centre of the dial.
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My new Mondeo goes to 160 on the dial, which is quite reasonable as top is supposedly 153. It's another discussion as to whether that is appropriate!
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Another gripe is kilometre makings in red on a black background e.g. some Ford models. These can be virtually impossible to read unless the sun is falling directly onto the face of the dial.
I remember this on my old Mondeo, but they were beautifully clear when illuminated at night.
I sold Fords when the Mondeo was launched, and one of the first "facelift" bits they did after the first year or so of production was to change the km/h calibrations on the speedo from white to red. If you have a very early build mk1 Mondeo, you won't have this problem.
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Not sure I've ever seen a car whose spedo. doesn't show 30 - however, I don't go in many new cars.
Isn't it a requirement that 30 is clearly indicated?
On some of my vehicles, the 30 also has a radial white line from the pivot point of the instrument to the 30 spot.
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SAAB used to vary the markings, 0 - 100 mph was over 3/4 of the readout with the last 60mph bunched into the last 1/4.
tinyurl.com/b9atd4 and tinyurl.com/ddpzrc
Don't know if they still do it or not.
Edited by gmac on 15/02/2009 at 14:17
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I wanted to say this in an earlier thread but I can't find it now.
In the seventies, Italian bike speedos used to under-read, whereas the Jap ones over-read.
So, at an indicated 100mph you were doing 95 on a Japper but 105 on something Italian.
I think the regs. might have changed since then.
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Those Saab dials look recent, as the needles are white, not orange. The layout looks very good and clear. Funnily enough, when the two-stage dial was introduced in the early 00s (with an orange needle) I thought the staging was overdone: with 0 almost at the bottom and 50 at the top, the sectors between marks were actually too big to take in intuitively, and I liked it less than the old, unstaged 0-150 dial it replaced.
Volvo marks its dials in 20s, not 10s, but they're almost as clear as the old Saab one. The worst I've seen recently is Skoda, where the numbers are printed radially, so they're almost upside-down in places. If they're going to copy ideas from watch designers, why not go the whole hog and mark them in roman numerals? "What's that, officer? XLVI, you say? I'm sure the speedo was only showing XXXVIII."
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octavia markings (mk II ) totally confused me when we first got it as it is marked in 10 mph increments up to 80mph and then the distance between the increments stays the same but this then becomes 20mph so when I thought I was doing 85 I was in fact doing 90. It does allow more space between the markings lower down the dial but it's not intuitive.
Also, as said, the rpm counter is marked in 10, 20 which doesn't readily distinguish it from the speedo to an unfamiliar driver, especially as the red line is not marked.
My Leon (mk II) is no better really - the speedo is marked at 0, 20, 40 and starts with the needle vertical - for a tall driver like me with the steering wheel at a suitable height it is very difficult to read below 30mph!
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One of the nicest things about my Accord is the huge speedo. It's about 6" across, brightly lit, and reads 80 with the needle straight up. It's trivial to see at a glance what speed you are doing, and much easier to read than any hire car I've had in the last couple of years.
Demonstrating the power of marketing though, that, and the lack of a 6-speed gearbox, were the two things that nearly put me off the car when I first went to look at it. It has an air of 'my first speedometer' about it on first glance. Ergonomically brilliant though.
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FT
{Isn't it a requirement that 30 is clearly indicated?}
if this is so someone forgot to tell Mazda - my one gripe about SWMBO Mazda 2 is 20 40 60 markings and 30 is hard to determine although I do know it's half way between 30 and 40 - a proper mark would be nice - 70 is no prpblem as sat nav screams at me.
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The ribbon-type speedos some cars had here and in America in the sixties were incredibly imprecise and rubbishy. And later Detroit went through a period, fortunately short, in which all speedos read up to 85mph and no higher.
In their day mechanical speedos could have a needle that swung rhythmically through a 20 or 30 mph arc at any sort of high cruising speed. You had to assume the middle reading must be more or less correct.
Like everything else, modern speedos have improved and read steadily. I suppose cars like the Citroen C4 with LCD dashboards can be made to read in miles or kilometres at the press of a button.
I certainly wouldn't claim an inaccurate speedo or ignorance of the mph/kph equivalents as a reason for getting caught speeding though. What's the matter with people?
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The new Audi A4/A5/TT manages to exasberate this problem - by not only omitting 30/50/70 markings and having a scale going up to 180mph, but the angle is also completely wrong. 0 is needle vertically down; 70 is just past quarter-to and 180mph is quarter past - so you lose the intuitive ability to gauge speed "at a glance" just by the angle of tjhe needle.
It does manage to compensate for it by also having a nice large digital speedo on the colour LCd screen in the middle of the dials though...
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