[time-nuts] Speedometers -- bah, humbug

Steve Rooke sar10538 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 22 03:36:57 UTC 2008


2008/12/22 Dave Ackrill <dave.g0dja at tiscali.co.uk>:
> Richard Moore wrote:
>>  The answer? The Feds then
>> required the speedometer to read not less than 2% nor more than 8%
>> high -- oddly enough, 5% is the mean of this variance. I don't know
>> what's required now. My '02 Toyota Highlander reads a tad less than
>> 1% high, based on readings from my Garmin eTrex.
>>
>>
> That's true this side of the herring pond as well...
>
> So, if you are caught on camera, you cannot say your speedo was telling
> you that you were under the speed limit.
>
> However, over here, you can still challenge the plods (UK term for
> Police Officers) to show that their measuring instruments were correctly
> callibrated on the day that they tracked you...
>
> If they did not keep to the law on this, then you were not lawfully
> shown to be over the limit.

Just a bit off topic but it's probably a waste of time having a really
accurate spedo over here in New Zealand. We have roadside cameras
which have a coil of wire in the road and the action of a speeding car
travelling over the coil triggers the speed detector. To me it seems
quite privative and I'd bet that it is not that accurate. A while back
someone contested a speeding ticket on the grounds that they wanted to
verify that the unit had been calibrated. Well it seems they cannot
reliably check the accuracy so this seemed to be a way out of any
ticket issued by these units therefore making all of them throughout
the country redundant. So the government fixed this by making a law
that basically said that the units don't need to be checked for
accuracy and that tickets given out by them cannot be challenged on
this issue.

73, Steve - JAKDTTNW
-- 
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
Omnium finis imminet




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