See If You Can Spot What’s Weird About My VW Tiguan’s Speedometer

I like to think of myself as an observant person. I regard the world around me with interest, and I try not to be a person who wanders through all the wonders that life has to offer blindly, barely taking in the rich visual tapestry of the world. I delight in the very act of seeing, of noticing the small things in the world, the way a fire hydrant can look like a little gnome in a conical hat or how the pattern of bark on a tree can mimic the tread of a tire, or maybe vice versa. The point is, I like to look at things.

Especially car-related things. Which is why I was so shocked to notice something about one of the cars that I own that I somehow haven’t noticed for six years of ownership.

Let’s see if you can spot it. Here’s the instrument cluster:

Now, let me just tell you something weird it’s not, which is the fact that the check engine light isn’t on, which it usually is. In fact, the only light on is the bulb replacement warning light, for one of the side marker lamps which I haven’t gotten around to replacing yet.

Honestly, I’m amazed there’s no check engine light; incredibly, the Tiguan is running great right now. I replaced all the coil packs and spark plugs recently, then had one of the front CV joints/driveshafts replaced, so it’s not like it hasn’t been demanding, but since then it’s been running like a top.

Now I need to find an entire redwood tree to knock on, if you’ll give me a moment.

Let’s get back to the speedometer here, though. Can you see what’s weird about it?

I suspect some of you have noticed by now. If you haven’t, here’s a hint:

Okay, that’s more than a hint, but still. There’s no 90 on the speedo! Why? They left out just one number in the series? It goes by 10s, except for 90?

That’s not exactly true, though; if we count the hash marks, it goes by fives; the smaller hash marks are the 5s, and the bolder ones are the 10s. After 80 it seems to switch to 10s, at the expense of showing our pal 90.

So, the question here is why; what’s the point of doing this? Well, from what I can gather, it’s a pretty sensible reason: the speeds from 0 to 80 are more used far more than 80 to 160, so why not skew the scale in favor of that?

I’ve complained about some cars before that have speedos that go up to absurd numbers at the expense of the speeds people actually drive at 90% of the time, where the span of the needle from 0 to 60 only lets the needle move an inch or a half or so. That’s dumb. And, sure, changing the scale of the needle isn’t a bad way to avoid that trap. Well, until I realized something about this generation of Tiguan: it’s electronically limited to 133 mph.

In fact, some variants of the 2.0-liter Tiguan only will hit 128 mph, which is, I should note, plenty. So if keeping the speedo scale reasonable and usable for day-to-day driving was VW’s goal here, then why the hell does the speedo go up to 160, 30 mph more than the car can actually hit?

VW just made their own problem by making a 160 mile speedometer, and then tried to fix it with the weird solution of getting rid of 90 and changing the scale? It’s all such ridiculous thinking. Does any Tiguan owner think they’re going to hit 160 mph? Is that really a fantasy VW found worth supporting?

I really can’t think of another car that just drops a number and changes scale mid-speedometer, but just out of curiosity I checked most the other cars in my fleet:

Going clockwise, we have my ’73 VW Beetle, my ’90 Nissan Pao, my ’83 Citroën 2CV, and my ’89 Ford F-150. The Pao and 2CV are both in kilometers, the Beetle and F-150 in miles. The Beetle, Pao, and 2CV all have speedos with optimistic top speeds that eclipse what the car is actually capable of: the Beetle goes to 90 (real top speed: 81), the Pao goes to 160 kph/100 mph (real top speed: 140 kph/87 mph), and the 2CV’s optimism caps at 120 kph/75 mph, when the real top speed is about 115 kph/71.5 mph.

Only the F-150 is truly modest, with an 85 mph speedo that undersell’s the truck’s actual top speed of somewhere around 100 to 105 mph. Interestingly, the F-150 is also the only vehicle I have that has both MPH and KPH on the speedo dial.

Point is, though, none of these eliminate numbers. These are all also old-school mechanical speedometers, not electronic ones like the Tiguan, so they likely don’t even have the option of changing scale mid-way through the dial.

It’s just weird! And, knowing what I know about the Tiguan’s actual top speed, kind of stupid. They could have just had a normal speedo that went to 130 and had a decent spread for the normal day-to-day speeds, at least as good as the speedo actually in the Tig is now. But instead they had to make it go to a speed 30 mph faster than the car could actually hit, and then remove a number and change the speedo scale?

Why, Volkswagen, why? Why are you making everything needlessly complicated? Maybe I’ll reach out to VW, because the more I think about this, the less sense it makes.

Still, I’m happy to not see that check engine light in there.