Why even in LADA and UAZ the speedometer is marked up to 200 km/h

The speedometers of most cars mark up to 200, 220, 250 km / h. And this despite the fact that the vast majority of them will not even go faster than 180 km / h, and the traffic rules of almost all countries of the world, including Russia, prohibit driving faster than 130 km / h. Don't automakers know this?

Many car owners are sometimes overtaken by recognition: even if the car, according to its factory performance characteristics, cannot go faster, for example, 180 km / h, its speedometer will most likely be calibrated to speeds over 200 km / h. And a childish, but persistent question arises: why is it so, is it not logical? The fact is that all automakers do this quite consciously. At the dawn of the automotive industry, no one thought about speed limits, and the creators of the first cars competed freely not only in engine power, but also in the image that their cars had. After all, the more numbers on the speedometer scale, the more cool the driver felt the owner of the car.

More than a hundred years have passed since then. A long time ago, in most countries of the world, speed limits were introduced, which is why automakers began to compete not in the maximum speed of their products, but in their ability to quickly accelerate to 100 km / h. However, it never occurs to anyone to install speedometers on cars, marked strictly up to the speed limit. Imagine that you are a customer at a car dealership. There are two almost identical cars in front of you, but only one has a speedometer calibrated to 110 km / h, and the other has a speedometer of up to 250 km / h. Which one will you buy?

However, in addition to purely marketing and traditional considerations in favor of the "overestimated" calibration of automotive speed meters, there are purely technical reasons.

The same machine model can have multiple engines. With the “weakest”, base engine, it is not able to accelerate, say, faster than 180 km / h - even downhill and with a hurricane tailwind. But when equipped with the top, most powerful engine, it easily reaches 250 km / h. For each configuration of the same model, developing a speedometer with a personal scale is too “bold”, it is quite possible to get by with one for all, unified.

On the other hand, if you mark the speedometers in accordance with the traffic rules, that is, with a maximum value somewhere around 130 km / h, then when driving along the highway, drivers will almost always drive in the “put the arrow on the limiter” mode. This, of course, may be flattering for some, but in practice it is inconvenient. It is much more comfortable to perceive information about the current speed for a long period of time when the arrow is located in a position close to the vertical, with a deviation of 10-15% in one direction or another. Please note: on the speedometers of most modern cars, speed marks between 90 km / h and 110 km / h are located precisely in the “near-vertical” zone of the arrow positions. That is, it is optimal for the standard "route" driving mode. For this alone, it would be worth calibrating speedometers to 200-250 km / h.