Odometer help/suggestion
 

How to change my scooter to KM instead of miles?

The only option I see to do this is in my profile, but my car odometer shows miles and my scooter shows kilometers, so I need to be able to set it per vehicle and not globally.

I also have another suggestion. I know that the odometer on my scooter shows 12% more km than I've actually gone. I've verified this with a GPS. Any possibility we can have an option to "calibrate" our mpg automatically so we can just send in what our odometer actually says and still get accurate results?

Ok, I figured out how to edit the vehicle and changed the scooter to be kilometers. I still think being able to automatically adjust for incorrect odometers should be an option though.

Thanks for the suggestion. The odometer suggestion has come up a few times, but we've always been hesitant to do it. It's much more straightforward if the mileage you post corresponds exactly to the numbers you see. We spend quite a bit of time explaining how the current system works—it'd be more difficult with percentage adjustments for odometer readings. Not impossible, but it would make the task more difficult. So we're opting for simplicity.

You could always note your odometer issues in your vehicle description. Or you could have your odometer adjusted so it matches what your're seeing with your GPS.

My odometer isn't adjustable. It's simply just geared incorrectly and the only way to fix it is replace it.

There could always be an "advanced options" under the vehicle options. Let people use it if they feel comfortable using it. The word "advanced" tends to scare people away that don't like messing with things.

The main variable is wheel & tyre size. I.e., after I increased the size of my tyres by one step, the odo is now reading 2.7% low. So I add this manually. Easy enough.

I would second the suggestion for having a "calibration" option.

lots of folks end up with mismatches between odometer and actual, because of incorrect gearing or non-standard tires and wheels, even seasonal tire changes.

Are you sure it was "verified" with a GPS? The Earth isn't flat. You are going up and down hills, however slight, and that adds up.

Here is a situation. You are going west bound up and down a hill. The hill goes up a half mile and back down half a mile, but in that distance, your east/west travel is only a half of a mile.

Your odometer will read 1 mile traveled, more or less, from going up and back down, but the GPS will say you only went 1/2 a mile across the map.

I live in FL. Trust me, there are no or very little hills here :)

It's possible that the very slight changes in elevation (like maybe 10 feet) some roads have would skew the gps results, but the odometer on my scooter shows 12.5% more km than the gps did. If we want to accommodate for hills than we could maybe reduce that to 10%

Good thinking though. I honestly hadn't even thought about that; I just don't think it was an issue with my testing.

Yeah, FL is pretty flat. The slight in/declines will add up, but not to the tune of 12%.

Yeah, it's just a cheap Chinese scooter, which most of the time have inaccurate odometers.

The best way to implement this (at least the displaying of it) would just be to always display the miles entered at the fuel up (whether odometer or tripometer) as what the user entered. Where it shows total miles tracked, just multiply it by how much the odometer is off. In my case, take the total number of miles and multiply it by .88 since mine is over by 12%. Then derive the mpg using this number.

Maybe even under the odometer display that shows the adjusted miles, but (X miles from odometer) in small text. I really like this site, and I would say this is a feature that would be beneficial to a lot of people, even people that don't realize it because they don't know their odometer is off.

My workaround is to use distance between fills, and forget about the odometer, so I can easily enter any distance my math gives.

In my case, my bike Teresa is a bit too modest - I've checked with road signs and google maps, and she's definitely off. Plus I often roll down our hill without turning the key so that distance isn't covered. And sometimes even the odo/tripmeter steps back to the last 'checkpoint' when it occassionally resets on a start. Therefore I have to correct every distance I get.

OTOH, I bought a car two weeks ago (no data entered yet) and I found that its odo/tripmeter is off again, compared to our bikes (Teresa is on the modest side, while our other bike, Ciliegia looks pretty much spot on), it counts more than the bikes. After a bit of research I learned that the equipped tires have 3% less diameter than the factory default - so I'll have to correct the distance again.

All in all, I won't ever use odometer data for anything other than timing maintenance.