Just lovely. My 1989 Dodge Daytona CS Turbo (177,000 miles) has recently gotten into the random habit of having the odometer needle “frozen” for a while, so I obviously can’t tell what my speed is. (I just approximate it and keep up with the flow of traffic.)
After I drive for a few miles, though, the needle starts working again.
Or, I will drive someplace and it works fine, but later on when I leave to go home, the “sticky” problem starts up again.
I wonder if I can live with this or if it’s the symptom of a deeper problem?
A similar thing happened to my Nissan pickup truck a few years back. It turned out that the needle had somehow bent Best I can figure is that it got a little too hot out in the sun one day.
Most likely it’s something in the speedometer itself. It’s probably easiest just to replace the whole thing.
It’ll be the speedo cable sticking within its sheath. They can puff some powdered graphite lubricant down between the actual cable and its sheath, if that doesn’t work then it’s new cable time.
Does the odometer still run? If it doesn’t, then you might face legal trouble when selling the car. If you intend to junk the car at the end of its service with you, there’s no problem at all. You don’t need a speedometer. I actually had the stepper motor on my speedo fail, and when I didn’t replace it for a couple months, I stopped looking down there altogether. I find I don’t need it.
I once had a '69 Toyota with a sticky speedo cable. One day, the needle suddenly zoomed up and up, 70, 80, 90, past 120 until it just disappeared, and I never saw it again.
The magnet probably caught some debris in the drag cup. Essentially, the magnetic field generated by a spinning magnet at the end of the speedo cable causes a force on an iron cup which increases linearly with speed; there is a spring that pulls it back, whose force increases linearly with displacement. When the magnet hit the iron cup, the forces increased by about an order of magnitude and just spun the needle all the way to the stop.
My speedometer is kind of tempermental in the cold.
When I start the car up in the morning in the winter when it’s been significantly cold, the speedometer is only accurate up to maybe 10-15 mph, at which point it starts making a horrible noise and starts jumping up all the way to its limit.
The longer I run the car (the warmer the thing gets), the higher the limit before it goes on the fritz.
Do you mean the speedometer?
Older and some newer model cars use a drag cup speedometer. Essentially the cable rotates a magnet within an aluminum cup directly connected to the needle and a torsion spring. The faster the car rotates the cable the more drag on the cup and the higher the speed indication. An extraneous particle of dirt, lint, etc. could be the culprit. A new speedometer/odometer head might be in order. The big expense is usually the labor to remove and replace vs. cost of parts.
Today: The needle worked fine, and I just ran it around the block a few minutes ago (after reading your post) to see if the numbers were advancing properly. Well, there are two different readouts, and the bottom one with the tenths is going along all right. I’ll run it some more tonight and see if the top one rolls to the next mile. Thanks for the tip.
My 1991 Ford Escort (lately stolen by the sheriff, but that’s another story) exhibited the exact same behavior.
It started the morning after I overnighted at Ashland OR on a drive south during the winter.
And it kept doing it on cold mornings, and not very cold mornings sometimes, too. Once the car warmed up, and the temperature gradient between the cabin and the engine sides of the firewall reversed, then the noise and weirdness went away.
But typically, not before I would lose my patience and bang on the dashboard in sometimes futile and seldom more than temporarily successful attempts to stop the mind-flailing racket. I would even use my steering wheel “Club” to bang on the dash, eventually cracking the aged and brittle vinyl. Once, I even hit the windshield on the backstroke with the Club, putting a nice crack in the damn thing, soon thereafter earning me a fix-it ticket and a $150 repair bill.
Finally, one winter morning, the speedometer just went crazy and went round and round and round and round, and then snap… it stopped at about 75 and never really moved again.
But the weird thing was, the odometer worked fine. So the problem wasn’t the cable, it was the worm gear behind the dash. I got real good at judging my speed without instrumentation. Stationary radar-based speed-reporting road sign trailers were very helpful in developing this skill.
Before it died, I inquired about getting it fixed, but the mechanic said that the entire instrument panel would need to be replaced, and special permits for replacing/resetting the odometer, etc… and it would cost more than the car was worth. Fuhgeddaboudit.
Best I can figure is that it got a little too hot out in the sun one day.