Adventure Bike Rider Forum

Made a novice mistake the other day, was on the Livingston dual carrigeway which js 50 MPH.
Was riding behind a guy in a sports car who was doing 40 MPH which I thought was rather slow, so I pulled out to overtake and as I was passing we came around a bend in the road to reveal a speed camera, was on my CBF1000 which has dials, seemed to indicate about 50 MPH on the speedo.
But a bit touch and go, after all it is not good practice to look at the speedo when you are overtaking someone.
We find ourselves riding bikes that do not actually tell us what actual speed we are doing, it would have been fine on the Super Ten which I have loaded with high Tech aand could have looked up the actual speed.

Ive found most of my old bikes were always between 2-5 mph under what the speedo was showing! so hopefully you'll be ok

I suppose the way around this problem would be to have look ahead capability.
You could run a drone locked to the bike , sounds hi tech, but certainly doable these days, it could identify hazards ahead of the bike, obviously to provide audidable warning (to avoid visual distraction)s, but not something that you want to get into, as it could be a short step into something more sinister.

Any Sat Nav will show your speed ... better than a built in speedometer

Or am I missing something (VERY basic) here ?? !!

No expert, but doesn’t a satnav not allow for the undulations of the ground and therefore always read lower than actual real time ground speed.

Now you know where the camera is get a can of yellow spray paint ................allez les gilets jaunes

My understanding is that all vehicles in the UK have speedos calibrated to read 10 mph over actual speed , so showing 50 is actually 40 mph?

Sat navs, I believe, show actual speed.

Also police guidance is to alow a rider or driver 10% plus 1 or maybe 2 mph over? but is discretionary only.

So possibly ok to do 56 mph actual speed .. or is that 66mph indicated?
Best try it out, and let us know

Having checked speedos numerous times against sat Navs and speed display radars I reckon that most cars and bikes are about 4 mph over at about 30 to 40 mph

catcitrus wrote: ↑Fri Aug 05, 2022 10:36 am Having checked speedos numerous times against sat Navs and speed display radars I reckon that most cars and bikes are about 4 mph over at about 30 to 40 mph

Agreed, my checks have come back at about 10% on my ragged collection of suzuki dual sports...

Speedo can have a tolerance of +10% + (I think) 10kmh so Gary is right in 40mph might read 50mph but it can be anything between the two. What it must not be is lower or higher than that.
I expect that we've all seen lag in GPS speed in poor weather, tree coverage, canyons and mountain riding. What I've never seen is a GPS reading higher than the speedo.
My new Transit connect reads about 2% higher than the GPS at steady motorway speeds.