May I add something to this from both the Canadian and British perspectives.
I, including family members, owned something like 30 ot 40 vehicles in the period from 1977 to 1999 in Canada. Plus I drove/rented, or was driven in, countless others, in the USA and Canada (and Mexico - scary driving there, but I did drive from Mexico City to Peublo). Not one car, so far as I can recall (and I always looked for this), had an incorrect km/h marking, whether the metric scale was primary (Canada and Mexico) or secondary (USA). And of course I have rented cars in very many other countries (Panama and Honduras in Central America, almost every country in Western Europe, Australia, South Africa, Republic of Ireland and Malaysia, and probably other places I have forgotten about, and never once did I see anything other than the correct 'km/h'. The only time I have seen anything incorrect - KM/H - was in one of the hundreds of cars I have sat in at the various Toronto and London motor shows I have attended over the past 30 years (I think it was a Rover 75 back in around 2003 or 2004, but can't be sure). Here in the UK, the cars I and my other half have owned have all had the secondary km/h scale correctly marked. Having said that, the metric scale on my 2007 Citroen C5 is difficult to read in daylight and utterly illegible at night (red numbers on a grey background, lit by orange lighting - the orange lighting turns the grey to red and simply washes out the red numbers; the primary scale with white numbers is fine, so it looks like the km/h numbers were almost an afterthought). My other half's Citroen C2 has an LCD digital speedometer (ugh!), which reads only in mph (UK default), but can be changed using the car's computer and the computer reset button to metric values, including 'km/h' (again correctly marked, as one would expect). But it is an either-or choice, you cannot have both displayed at once. Some trivia on car speedometer markings: A SAAB 99 I had in 1975 in Canada had a secondary metric scale, almost unknown back then. Whether unique to Canada (and possibly Britain), or whether USA models also had it, I don't know. My 1988 Canadian-spec Jeep Cherokee had a metric only speedometer. In 1992 I traded this in for another Cherokee - which had a dual marked scale (metric-predominant of course). In 2002, I was driven in Holland by a Dutch friend who also had a Cherokee - and this had the same dual marked scale as my 1992 model! Bizarre, especially for a vehicle destined for mainland Europe. In Canada, many of the mainstream European manufacturers (SAAB, Audi, BMW, etc) are still producing cars with metric only speedometers, although Volkswagen and Mercedes I believe are now dual marked. Again in Canada, all the Japanese and Korean manufacturers dual mark their speedometers (but nothing else to the best of my knowledge - fuel in liters, temperature in degrees Celsius, tire pressures in kilopascals, odometers in kilometers). Japanese and Korean cars outside of Canada will have metric only speedometers. Regards John F-L ----- Original Message ----- From: John M. Steele To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 4:45 PM Subject: [USMA:48531] Re: correct SI symbolism on U.S. speedometers? Paul, See summary of FMVSS101 on USMA site, or search for the official text. At any rate, wrongness is bounded as the symbols MPH for miles per hour and km/h (if there is a secondary scale) are prescribed. However, "any" combination of upper and lower case is permitted. I have never seen anyone go crazy with mPh or kM/h, but in theory it is not disallowed. If you Google "instrument clusters" and specify images, you can see a lot of examples. All I saw are correct. The secondary scale for km/h was required years ago, made optional some time ago (I can't find date) and is apparently being reconsidered because of Canada and Mexico. If it is reinstated, I hope there is some "equally legible" or "minimum readability" requirement. It is near useless on one of my cars, pretty usable on the other. Guess which one I would take to Canada. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Paul Trusten <trus...@grandecom.net> To: U.S. Metric Association <usma@colostate.edu> Sent: Thu, September 16, 2010 10:37:00 AM Subject: [USMA:48529] correct SI symbolism on U.S. speedometers? So far, I have seen only the correct symbol for kilometers per hour, "km/h," on U.S. dual-scale speedometers. Has anyone on this list seen otherwise, e.g., the usual misnomer "KPH" on a speedometer installed on a car meant for the U.S. market? Thanks, Paul T.
