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by kayoone
2279 days ago
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This is a cool hack but is it really legal? In the EU speedometers have to be carefully calibrated, have strict regulations to pass and your car is not allowed to drive with a broken one. Just replacing it with a, sometimes spotty, GPS signal sounds impossible here. Like, what do you do when driving through a tunnel? |
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First off, check out the front bumper. Bull bars like that were banned in the UK and throughout Europe on grounds of safety. This wasn't a recent ban either. The bull bar says a lot about what the driver thinks of other people and, in this case, through the lens of a EU citizen, it is not friendly.
Then there is the general safety aspect of the design of this vehicle. It is the worst hotch-potch of compromised design you could come up with. It is in Homer Simpson territory. The problem was the rollover test, so they lowered the tyre pressures and thinned out the material in the roof to give it a lower centre of gravity. So if you did go round a corner (like they have in European roads) then you could end up crushed to death. But let's not be self-centred, due to the bulk of the vehicle you could also crush the occupants of another vehicle to death. Not a good look.
The eventuality of this is rare, but more likely if the speedometer has been mangled into some Raspberry Pi screen. Try explaining that to the police, insurance company and grieving family members.
The low tyre pressures and the general obesity of the vehicle meant that fuel economy was worst-in-class. This vehicle is therefore the worst type of gas-guzzler, the poster-child-SUV for global warming. They sold these excuses for vehicles as 'trucks' rather than 'cars' as it was a tax fiddle that, combined with the 'Chicken Tax', meant that lousy design was permitted. So much for the 'free market' and 'competition'.
I would say the hacky Raspberry Pi speedometer is well suited to the general hackiness of the vehicle's botched and very American engineering. It is in character, a quick and dirty solution that certainly would not meet EU standards for safety.
A proper mechanic would rip this hacky solution out and put in the correct cable/sensor in minutes. Sometimes you have got to respect the skills people have and wonder why it is they do it properly rather than go for abominable hacks. But this vehicle isn't worthy of a mechanic's time, it needs to be taken out to the scrapyard and replaced with something practical like a planet-friendly bicycle.