Greetings,

 

The way I have my seat and steering wheel set up just obscures the 70 on the speedo (meter that etc etc) and so I know roughly what my speed is without head bobbing to find out.

 

Today, on a rare washing and polishing exercise, I noticed the speedo (meter etc etc) has standard gradations up to 80, After that the next number was 100 then 120 then 140 then 160 (mph that is)

 

Now I've never had a car with a speedo (etc etc) labelled like this and I was more than mildly surprised to see it . Should I have been stopped I don't think the excuse that "I thought I was doing about 85" would hold water when in fact I was (allegedly) doing almost 100mph.

 

I assume that the same speedo is used in all variants of Superb (and indeed all VW offshoots) to keep costs down. Fair enough I should have looked at ALL possible problem areas when I bought the car, and indeed thought I had, but finding this worried me. How many times have I been in the automatic loss of licence zone thinking I was doing 90 when I was doing 100 (ish)? Well, NONE obviously!!

 

It would have been my fault I know, and I must start to "head bob" even especially when enjoying a drive on a quiet road /motorway. I just thought I'd warn anyone else out there if they hadn't noticed this anomaly.

 

Still, mustn't grumble. The car's running great and it's difficult to keep under 90 - or is that 100? Although I do manage it - HONESTLY.

 

AndyW

Edited 6 April, 201610 yr by Charade

My speedo is similar on my 10 year old Octavia but I am used to it

 

Out of curiosity - I am thinking of buying a 2.0 CR 140 Superb like you have - can I ask - do you find you have plenty of grunt on the motorway for overtaking?

 

I have a 140 now but Superb is obviously slightly heavier but the 0-60 quoted is only 0.5 s slower - so I'd imagine in the real world I'd never notice a difference. I'm encouraged by your difficult to keep under 90 comment though, that shows me it's a good motorway mile cruiser.

Can you adjust the height of the steering wheel to get the numbers back in view? If not set the speed limit warning to complain to you before you hit 100. 

 

An interesting thing about this is that the nonlinear zone on km/h speedometers starts at a different point to mph speedometers in the Superb, which means that the software in the instrument panel can be loaded with different speed-angle table for the speedometer needle position. This means it's theoretically possible to make the needle movement linear.

 

g-tee: Be very careful with the Superb as compared to the Octavia you can be going 15-20 mph faster and not notice compared to the Octavia. I thought my fuel economy was poor when I got the Superb at first until I realised I was going faster in almost every situation but it didn't feel like it .

Edited 6 April, 201610 yr by psycholist

Thanks psycholist - that reminds me when I was travelling in a friends Mondeo - I happened to catch the speed and there was no way it felt we were going... ahem... that quickly. Such is the beauty of a large car.

Greetings

 

g_tee - As you would expect, overtaking in 6th gear is sluggish but OK if you're not in a rush, 5th is much better, 4th is (for me) more than adequate but if you're going to use 4th at speed turn OFF the consumption figures in the display. I totally agree with psycholist's comments - the car is so quiet and easy to drive a "no licence" situation can easily beckon if not careful.

 

psycholist - I knew the speedo (etc etc) would have a scientific name   I don't really want to change the driving position as it's taken me 8 months to find the right one for me (no electric seat unfortunately). Good point about the speed limit warning though. As I say, I only found this "quirk" today and I must admit the SLW never entered my mind - thanks.

 

AndyW

Edited 6 April, 201610 yr by Charade

An interesting thing about this is that the nonlinear zone on km/h speedometers starts at a different point to mph speedometers in the Superb, which means that the software in the instrument panel can be loaded with different speed-angle table for the speedometer needle position. This means it's theoretically possible to make the needle movement linear.

 

This is relatively well understood and customisable, the hardest part is getting the eeprom data from the cluster.

 

The O2 FL has linear increments so it could be a simple case of switching the dial faces over and fixing the scales. It'll mostly depend on warning light positions in the middle of the dials.

This is relatively well understood and customisable, the hardest part is getting the eeprom data from the cluster.

 

The O2 FL has linear increments so it could be a simple case of switching the dial faces over and fixing the scales. It'll mostly depend on warning light positions in the middle of the dials.

Wow. All this has put my theory of "head bobbing" to shame

 

I must admit I hadn't given my initial post much thought, just wrote what I felt. I never thought that there was scientific fact behind my "discovery". Genuinely Interesting.

 

AndyW

The arrangement of the graduations on the dial is designed so that the range most used is linear, with 70 mph at the top of the dial for UK cars. Beyond that lie speeds which are outside the commonly used range for the UK market (legally at least!) so that portion of the dial is compressed.

 

On metric clusters for the EU market, the non-linear portion starts at 180 km/h, and 120 km/h is at the top of the dial. Given the higher traffic speeds prevalent on the continent's motorways, this makes sense.

 

It also means the dial faces from a metric cluster can't just be stuck onto a UK cluster to convert it, the programming has to be changed too. IME with older clusters, there's usually a security setting on the portion of the data range associated with the speedometer that has to be reset too - they don't really want people messing with this stuff

Greetings

 

So, let me get this straight!

 

The speedo (etc etc) works in a nonlinear zone that is different in mph to kmh that can be loaded with different speed-angle table for the speedometer needle position which is relatively well understood (thanks psycholist) and customisable however the hardest part is getting the eeprom data from the cluster (thanks langers2k). 

 

And I can only totally agree with chimaera, mainly because I'm well out of my depth now and swimming in the sea of ignorance.

 

I remember my Triumph Herald, a truly high tech piece of machinery. I never understood the Speedo (etc etc) in that as it never worked. Funnily enough it never worked in my Austin 1100 either. My Honda always registered 7 mph BELOW actual (according to my SatNav) and My Vauxhall cavalier  never got the chance to work as it was written off by the delivery driver on his way to deliver it to me.

 

As long as I can keep the needle in my Superb at on or below 10 minutes past the hour I shall be happy. (Aaah happy - I remember that (Thanks to Basil Fawlty))

 

AndyW

 

nb - Having read this reply I feel it can be interpreted as taking the ****. I won't rewrite it though. Honestly, no sarcasm intended. I meant what I said before. Genuine respect to all who design cars (software cheats, warts and all) and even greater respect for "ordinary" people that understand what it's all about and what can (and can't) be done about it.

For the curious (or bored) this thread documents a bunch of work I and others did on some older VAG instrument clusters. The modern ones are rather more advanced technologically, but the principles for the gauges are mostly the same.