g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Friday, December 18, 2009
05:24 - Oh VW, what happened to you? You used to be cool
http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Volkswagen_GTI/photos-interior/spee

(top)
Did they seriously do this on the 2010 GTI?



Look at the speedometer. Look what happens to the markings at the high end.

Yeah. The large labeled tick marks are at 10 mph intervals, up to 140 where they suddenly switch to 20 mph apart. 120... 130... 140... oh hey 160 180! No difference in spacing. Just a shameless relabeling of the car's top indicatable speed as 180. And since you'll never actually get the car up to anywhere near that speed, there's no way you'll ever notice that the gauge is totally inaccurate in that range (unless, of course, they actually made it so the gauge responds twice as slowly above 140 mph, which somehow I doubt).

I'm no VW hater, lord knows. But damn.

Honestly I'm kinda having a hard time deciding whether this is a travesty, or some kind of awesome. To do something that bald-faced—making what amounts to an unverifiable and implausible claim about your car, then sticking it right in front of your face every day to taunt you... well, that takes stones. Or extreme tone-deafness. I'm totally unsure which it is in this case.

UPDATE: Let me be clear about what I'm saying here. VW could have done what Lotus did with the Elise:


...And made it so there's no secret about where the sensitivity of the gauge changes. On the Elise tach, it's immediately obvious that they're using two different scales; the tick mark density changes, the labels are much closer together, and so on.

VW isn't doing that. They're keeping exactly the same tick marks and labeling, but silently switching scale on you, so unless you're really alert, you won't realize there's any difference between the one region and the other. A lab instrument designed like this would be used primarily for pranks.

And note that Lotus apparently isn't doing the variable-sensitivity tach thing anymore anyway:

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© Brian Tiemann