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.
I had this same thing in a rental last year, but the switch was lower. Some Korean CUV. I noticed it as soon as I started driving as it was in the range I was going and I was surprised that the increment had changed.
I love that the 2CV Speedo is also the rev counter, with red lines showing maximum speeds in each gear.
Some “modern” cars like the 2014 Daihatsu Ayla in its ultra-bare-bones, D trim, have this too!
Bunch of motorcycles I had growing up used this. Maybe it’s a Honda thing?
Once you rubbed my nose in it, I did see that 90 is indeed missing. I rented a Tiguan eight years ago and didn’t notice.
I laughed about 10 years ago when the Toyota Corolla rented in 2021 had a speedo that had marks up to 160 mph. That’s aspirational, I thought at the time.
Then I got home and looked at the speedo in my ’17 Accord and it also went up to 160. I’ve read it’s governed at 124 or somewhere thereabouts. In its ~83,000 miles it has only seen 100 once or twice.
My ’01 Jetta TDI also had a 160 mph speedo, but the tach max’d out at 6K rpm with a redline of around 4600.
But they all have/had consistent markings around the dials.
My Mk6 GTI has almost identical gauges, and mine keeps the scale the whole way through. It tops out at 180. That’s… optimistic.
Something similar is going on with the F-150, there are 4 hash marks between the 0 and 15 and then 9 between the 15 and 25, 25 and 35, etc. up to 85. So from 0-15 each hash mark represents 3 MPH and then above 15 each hash mark represents one MPH.
The font on the LCD screen caught my eye. It’s a bit blocky and constrained by the low-res dot matrix, but there’s some Comic Sans-ishness going on with the letter forms if you look closely. That’s… Something.
Nobody is asking why the Ford dial goes 15, 25, 35, 45 instead of 10, 20, 30, 40?
And it doesn’t even have a 10
Forget the VW speedometer, THAT’S even weirder.
My guess would be this thing was designed back in the days of the 55 mph speed limit.
It was, 55 has a red marker on it.
I was looking at the 1 on the fuel gauge.
What about the fact that it shows your fuel level in sixteenths? Does anyone really need to know whether they have 1/2 or 9/16 left? (Or like the picture shows, 27/32?)
150mph in a wingless Tiguan would be astonishing!
Jason, knowing what this car’s put you through, I wouldn’t point up the lack of check engine light. You’re just tempting it to shit the bed at the worst possible time, like when you’re about to take Otto for his driver’s test.
Have a backup, fully legally registered car just in case. We’re cool about FARM USE or the random Argentina plate, but the driving examiner won’t be.
Sir, do you know how fast you were going?
Um, 85 or 90. I’m not really sure.
Definitely odd. Did they use this same cluster in a car that could get a whole lot closer to 160?
I think Saab solved this on thier later cars pretty well, as they did so many things. 0-90 was normally spaced and easy to read, 90-160 was compressed to the last 1/4 or so of the gauge.
Before I even read the article… I’ll say is it because it skips the 10mph demarcations after 80mph, am I right?
VW gonna VW I guess. Typical German “this complicated solution is the best solution and I will hear no further arguments. Guten TAG, sir.”
To me, the odd thing is that fuel gauge. How often does a fuel gauge label indicate a full tank as a ‘1’? It’s usually “e”, some fractions or slashes, then an “f”, right?
It is one tank of fuel though.
when you get fuel in NJ, “One tank of fuel, my good man, and chop chop!”
Some older VWs labeled the fuel as gauge as 0, 2/4, 4/4. Just odd as well.
Though I miss the delightful rationality of a single indicator light for both indicators. Why do you need one on each side when the lever itself tells you which is blinking?
I like the VW one with R, 1/2, 1/1 on it.
We used to have a ’21 Buick Envision with the 0 to 1 fuel gauge. When my wife asked me about it I turned into Calvin’s dad. “This car came with one tank. If it had dual tanks it would read 0 to 2.” She bought it for a few days.
I first thought it would be misnumbering, but missed the fact that 90 was missing.
Then I thought it would be the slanted hash mark on 60.
I thought it was the slant hash mark at first two, but then realized it’s only because they are marked off a slanted surface and not on exactly the same plane as the numbers
Jason, “they” have studied this yet you may have stumbled onto an opportunity for a PhD dissertation to add to it.
1) “Selective attention” You were too busy focusing on the constant check engine light issue or the taillights of car in front of you. Therefore you didn’t “see” the weird speed for 6 years.
2) “Confirmation bias” You just needed to know that the engine was still running and you weren’t exceeding the speed limit. Therefore, the speedo confirmed that you were indeed moving and at or under posted limit ignoring the lack of 90 EVEN if you did see it.
3) “Frequency illusion” aka (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon — soon to be Torchinsky phenomenon) whereby once you see that there is no 90 on the speedometer, you can no longer “unsee” it. You start an investigation of every speedometer to fact-check your own mental status to make sure you’re not losing it.
Same exact thing happened to me when I noticed a new plant in my living room. Saying “who put that there?” Unbeknownst to me it had been there for 6 years.
To me it’s a lot more weird that the ’73 Beetle has a speedo with the 80 and 90 MPH indicated upside down.
Officer I was only going 06 miles per hour so what’s the problem?
Thank you for getting hung up on that with me, that’s driving me crazy.
The 10 and 20 are the same, they don’t want you turning you head to read the speedometer I guess.
I wonder if they are basically using the same speedo for KPH and MPH and just changing the label and the programming. 160 KPH is s pretty reasonable place to top out a speed reading. Even if you could go faster, I assume acceleration is tapering off.
No, in Euro spec you get more than 200km/h, IIRC even the Diesel has 240km/h on the speedo. 160km/h would not be acceptable in Germany, nor Italy, but for different reasons