I have found that my 2000 TL's speedometer reads about 5% fast which also makes the odometer record the mileage 5% higher than it should. Have any of you with NAVI option noticed this? While I don't have that option I do have a Garmin Street Pilot and compared the speedo to it as well as checking the interstate mile posts over 50 mile stretches. This is my third Acura and all three have been this way. In contrast my Yukon and Jeep speedometers have been perfect. I may be synical, but could this be an Acura/Honda plan to short-change us on warranty? I had my TL back to the dealer today and had the speedometer checked and they told me that it was within spec at only off by 3%. This seems significant to me, what are your thoughts?

DT

 

That's a significant finding and if you can prove it is like that on all their cars...class action...

How much was it to test the speedo at the dealer?

 

The dealer checked the speedo under warranty.

DT

 

My speedo is off also (I found out shortly after I purchased new). I used my Garmin GPS III+ to find out. I'm going to do it again this weekend so I can see if this is still the case.

But I can tell you that it's not that way on all Acura cars. This topic was discussed over a year ago and several people indicated that they were good.

An Acura plan? Not likely because it wouldn't save them much money. Don't they pay for warranty work after the warranty has expired? Yes they do all the time so why would they attempt to induce a 5% or more error that will only gain them several months early expiration that they might still pay on anyway? Doesn't make sense....

 

Speedometers are intentionally made to read "fast" to clear the manufacturers from liability issues on speeding tickets. When I'm going an actual 60 mph the speedo indicates about 62 mph. When I'm going 116 mph, the speedo indicates about 122 mph. And pretty much every car i've driven both import and domestic have been similar, except for maybe the old pos 84 pontiac 6000 that I drove. I think the speedo was actually reading slow on that :p

But as for this odometer issue, that's rather serious on the warranty issues. If you can prove the odometer is reading "fast" as well then yes, I think that would be grounds for a class action lawsuit.

 

FWIW--on my TL-S the speedo is accurate at least up to 90 mph, at least when compared to my Garmin III+. I don't know how accurate it is past 90, nor do I really care since I don't plan on doing the majority of my driving at triple-digit speeds anyway.

Of course, for all you guys putting on certain-sized 18" and up tires, the possibility does exist--however minor--of the speedo reading a tad bit higher than normal.

As far as whether a class-action may be in order--I'm no lawyer, but I would imagine that it would take way more than one or two instances of a highly-inaccurate speedo in addition to having concrete evidence that Acura knew that their speedos were inaccurate across the board to even consider a class-action lawsuit. I don't know what the threshhold would be but I would imagine that a 5% error isn't that big a deal. My bike reads a speedo-indicated 60 mph while my GPS shows 55 mph--9% higher than 55; you'll find this same error on just about every 1999 CBR600F4 (what I ride). However frustrating such an error may be, it wouldn't be serious enough to justify a lawsuit.

Finally, I would think the manufacturers are smart enough these days to not tie in odometer and speed readings based on a single monitoring point--it would be so easy to slap on an oversized tire and throw off your odometer so that it reads lower than actual, thereby extending your mileage warranty. Using my bike again, one would think that with the speedo being off by 9% at 60 mph (within average typical cruising speed) the odometer would be way off too (your odometer would read 60 miles instead of 55) but I have found it not to be the case, as the odometer is just about dead on accurate. Yeah, I'm talking apples and oranges, but if a bike odometer can still give an accurate reading even with an inaccurate speedo, I can't see why it would be any different with a car.

Sorry for the long post...

Tony

 

Just for the record, my speedometer/odometer is off by the 5% with stock, original equipment tires and wheels. The car has absolutely no modifications. That means I lose 1800 miles of my 36000 mile warranty.

DT

 

For you class action advocates, let me play the role of devil's advocate for a moment. Here are my first two questions (and this is assuming you can prove that there is a sufficiently uniform error among cars to justify class treatment, which is a pretty major assumption):

1. Where is your contractual basis (or any basis) for claiming that you are entitled to warranty coverage based on something other than the mileage indicated on your odometeer, regardless of whether it is 100% accurate?

2. Assuming you satisfactorily answer #1, what are your damages?

I'd love to represent Acura in this class action suit.

 

Thats funny. When I pass the stationed radar off the highway, it always says I am going 5mph slower than my speedometer. Is that the same or the oposite of what you are talking about.

 

Class action suit to fix the issue with parts, I think it is not a contract case but a misrepresentation of facts and breach of the explicit warranty by the merchant Acura. All of us would have justifiably relied on this and their equipment should it be within 2 miles per hour with todays technology. 5mph is crazy. I don't think we can get punitive damges in a contract suit but if it were a tort, than yes we could! We would have to prove that they intended to speed up the mileage fraudulently. Not easy to do

 

Who decides what the error should be? Plus, any error should be given as a percentage rather than a threshhold, since the error is not linear at any given speed (e.g., accurate at 30, +5 at 60, +8 at 90).

Like I said, my bike speedo is 5 mph faster at indicated 60 (and gets higher as the needle climbs); many motorcycles of all makes and models have similar errors. Now, if 5 mph was arbitrarily considered too great an error and/or in violation of some speedo measurement statute, I'm sure us motorcyclists would have heard about it already.

Tony

 

The US Code of Federal Regulations says:
Reference Link

Note that "reasonable accuracy" has been clarified by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to mean:

Reference Link

So there's your answer. It seems that a +/- 10% error is expected!

 

Duh, that was for trucks. Hang on...

Amazingly, I can't find any tolerance figures for passenger cars in the CFR database... Anyone else want to take the challenge?

 

They are TRICKY!!!

 

Think about it......when your tires are wearing down, you are actually losing mileage also........Shorter tires say faster than you're really going.

This must be a conspiracy.......:p

 

Those who think there is a class-action lawsuit possibility are missing the point. Here's an example of a Class Action Lawsuit FAQ.

I have yet to hear that anyone has been damaged by an inaccurate odometer. If you get 45,000 on the warranty and the inaccurate odometer caused you to reach 45,001 when you actually had only 43,000 and your transmission broke and they refused to pay, then you might have a singular claim in court, maybe. But nobody owes you money when you have a perfectly good car with nothing wrong with it and your warranty comes and goes.

You want to be paid because your warranty was up before you felt like it should be up? Even though nothing has happened? That's what you'll have to contend with a Class because there aren't any claims, no damages until something happens to harm you.

Even at 45,001 Acura will fix your damn tranny anyway, so you still don't have a personal claim much less a Class Action. Everybody wants to sue and pull other people into it saying we all have a [valid] case. Have you ever thought that the warranty was actually 40,000 and Acura put it at 45,000 to take into account any inaccuracies? 45,000 to the customer is an arbitrary number so even then you wouldn't have a case regarding this "magic" number because it is arbitrary. You agreed to the 45,000 miles on the odometer, not 45,000 on 2-ply non-skid highway pavement, 5% grade with 23% tire wear, blah-blah-blah. There is no perceived value to 45,000; nothing measurable, nothing quantifiable; how can you say there is a difference between 45,000 and 43,000?

You can't say time because there are separate time constraints on a warranty. From a customer standpoint, that's why there is a time-limit on the warranty. If you buy a new car and park it for 5-years, when you start to drive it again, you're going to have a brand new car with brand new parts and 10 miles on the odometer, and no warranty coverage.

I like to put the shoe on the other foot, too. If Acura discovered that the stock tires were causing the speedo to read inaccurately low and they start telling people that your warranty is really up at 39,000 miles instead of 45,000 and it turns out they were right, the customer was getting the advantage, would you agree to that? Didn't think so....

 

For starters, Acura should probably fix your tranny (or anything else) under warranty at 45,001 because...unless your brand new car had less than 1 mile on the odometer, Acura has to honor the warranty (time limit not withstanding). When they say "45,000 miles" they don't mean, "when the odometer hits 45,000", but 45,000 miles in addition to what the odometer reading was when you picked up your new car. That is one of the primary reasons why the odometer reading is noted on the new-car paperwork.

Other than that, if Acura decides to fix something barely out of warranty, they do so purely out of good-faith and/or customer relations, not because you think that they have a legal obligation to do so.

Something else to note: correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that in CA if your car is in the shop for more than a day (or maybe even minimum 1 day) due to warranty work the auto manufacturer has to extend your original warranty by the number of days the car was in the shop.

Tony

 

Exactly. That's exactly what I meant. How can you have a lawsuit when you will rarely if ever encounter a situation when an inaccurate odometer cause you to lose your warranty coverage? Particularly if Acura is going over and above the warranty period (in good fait) for the class, sometimes.

Complaint: Acura is cheating me about 1,500 miles because the speedometer is inaccurate. I need $1,500 in compensation.
Respondant: We will generally repair a serious warranty situation where a [covered] parts fails after the original warranty fails...blah, blah, blah.

Where are the damages?

 

When I began this thread I was merely wondering if others had inaccurate speedometers. I certainly wasn't then, or now, advocating any type of legal action.

I agree, as long as I don't have a warranty claim within the first few thousand miles out of warranty there will be no issue. But if so, I will expect Acura to take care of things.

I've read with great interest the discussions above and I would like to offer another way that owners could be harmed by the inaccurate speedometer/odometer. If you are leasing your car and run over the mileage limit, you will be paying more than you should at lease end. For example, you have a 3 year 36,000 mile lease and you turn the car in with 40,000 on the odometer. With a 5% error you've really only travelled about 38,000 miles. So you end up with an extra 2000 miles at $0.20/mile for $400.

Fortunately, I own mine.

DT

 

As someone else pointed out, you will always have some speedo error if only because your tires do lose tread. Don't tell me that there is someone out there anal enough to make a big odometer error issue due to tire wear...

Personally, I'm not too concerned at all about my speedometer accuracy. Gee, there are worse things in life you can potentially be screwed out of besides mileage.

Tony

 

i stopped reading about 5 posts ago...

Just cuz ur speedo is off (mine is -- said 33 and i went past one of those road speed signs it said I was doing 29)
the speedo is not sequentially linked to the odometer---thats something separate.....

correct me if im wrong

 

I believe that is probably true, especially in later-model vehicles. Like I said in a previous post here in this thread, even though my motorcycle speedo is off, the odometer isn't.

Tony

 

Damages in terms of value too. The car depreciates in value faster.

BTW I don't really care about it, just discussion.

 

How about Leases. $.15 a mile for miles over. $540

 

I think TommyBoiSxty9 is right about Speedometer and Odometer are seperated. I actually(the same topic has been beating to death on several other forums before) went ask a MB tech(as well as another BMW tech), they both stated that virtually all cars' speedometers are off.. the "reasonable accuracy" means any where from 5% to 10%... usually, all MB speedometer reads 3KM-6KM faster than actually speed, and so are BMWs'.... odometer is not directly linked to speedometer(in another word, it's not reading mileage base on how fast speedometer reads), but detected using seperate, series of sensors....

Again, like some mentioned, the inaccuracy is made intentionally by car makers, and 3%-5% really isn't way off, and should consider "reasonably accurate"....

FYI, even Ferrari/Porsche speedometers have certain % of inaccuracy... at speed of over 120mph, a Porsche 993 speedometer is actually off by as much as 10% - 13%....

Andy Kuo

 

Some (or all) of this can be attributed to the Cosine Angle Effect, a principle in doppler radar for calculating speeds of moving objects. In a very short summary, for stationary radar devices, unless the radar device is *directly* in front of you at your vehicle height and in the center of your travel lane, the speed will *always* read less then what you are actually travelling. Sometimes it will be fractions of a m.p.h. (which is also always rounded *down*) so you really don't notice, or sometimes it will be a few m.p.h. For example, if you approach a fixed position radar gun at a 60 degree angle from the center of transmitted energy, your speed will read exactly half of what you are really travelling. This is not a malfunction of your speedometer or the radar gun--both are functioning perfectly. Just the Cosine Angle Effect at work.