Tim Pollard is fed up with wildly excessive speedo readings. Here’s why
It was a few miles into my drive of Audi’s slinky new A5 3.0 TDI when I noticed it. The oh-so-cool, Germanically precise speedometer read to an absurd 180mph. One hundred and eighty miles an hour! In a diesel executive!
The more I looked at the A5’s speedo, the more annoyed I became. Virtually the entire usable UK speed range from nought to somewhere between 60 and 70 fell in the bottom left-hand quarter of the dial. So unless you routinely blat at upwards of a ton, you’re never going to use three-quarters of the speedo. Of course, I may be mistaken. Most A5 owners may regularly take their £33k, 1.6-tonne pride and joy on a track. Or fancy a stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure. But I suspect most won’t.
It’s the same on the new BMW M3; in a game of corporate speedupmanship, its dial arcs round to a barely credible 200mph. Is this the ultimate in German ego-massaging? Neither the Audi nor BMW will exceed a limited 155mph, so why bother stretching their imaginary v-max to three miles a minute and beyond? Yes, you could remove the limiter, but how many owners really do this in the camera-hawked, traffic-clogged 21st century?
Seems it’s more about schoolboy fantasy than accurate driver information. Reminds me of when I asked the A5 chief engineer why its Multitronic had eight pre-programmed ‘ratios’ on a CVT auto which is essentially a single-speed gearbox anyway. ‘The typical customer likes it,’ admitted Stefan Härdl. ‘It feels much more dynamic.’
And there you have it. Maybe German cars now place style over substance, posing over engineering pragmatism.