With fuel prices spiralling, a young man’s fancy turns away from V8s and four wheel drives to hot hatches.

Mazda’s new Mazda3 MPS looks liks a piping-hot hatch, with its 190kW turbo engine. Most reviewers comment that this is far and away the hottest of the current breed of hatches – and there’s plenty of competition. But check out the speedo…

With a range of 0 – 280 km/h spread over only (about) 200 degrees of the possible arc of pointer travel, this crazy instrument would make it almost impossible to accurately read and maintain speed at (say) 40km/h in a School Zone.

Surely the most sensible design approach would be to:

• maximise the use of available instrument space by placing the top speed as far as possible in the clockwise direction of rotation
• use a non-linear graduation of the instrument (easy in an electronic speedo) so that (say) the first half of the needle’s travel shows speeds from 0 – 100km/h, and the second half of the travel shows 100 – [maximum] km/h
• show a sensible maximum speed (there’s no way this car would ever get to 280km/h – even down hill with a tail wind!).

Frankly, Mazda, this is just silly.

This entry was posted on 31 Oct 2006 at 14:09 (Sydney) and is filed under Cars, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.