If the speedo doesn’t work then yes it’s illegal. Is that an intercooler? Some places may have an issue with it sticking out.
If the car is considered an antique you can get away with a lot. People are importing rare 90s Japanese cars because you can get away with having left hand drive. Over 25 years old is considered antique.
No one inspects your car like in Germany they just test emissions. The cops will have to see you and pull you over.
Other than the tires extending past the fender, I don't see anything potentially illegal. The wooden "spoiler" doesn't look properly well attached, but you probably wouldn't be pulled over for that.
Cars in far worse shape than that are driven on the roads here all the time.
In the US each state sets their own requirements for what is street legal. Each state also determines their own vehicle inspection requirements which vary from none to annual.
Then again, this car is in Malibu, California, a general region where you get a ticket for failing to display a front license plate, on a vehicle that has a front license plate.
In the EU speedometers have to be carefully calibrated, have strict regulations to pass and your car is not allowed to drive with a broken one. Just replacing it with a, sometimes spotty, GPS signal sounds impossible here. Like, what do you do when driving through a tunnel?
In the EU the broken speedometer would be the least of this vehicle's problems.
First off, check out the front bumper. Bull bars like that were banned in the UK and throughout Europe on grounds of safety. This wasn't a recent ban either. The bull bar says a lot about what the driver thinks of other people and, in this case, through the lens of a EU citizen, it is not friendly.
Then there is the general safety aspect of the design of this vehicle. It is the worst hotch-potch of compromised design you could come up with. It is in Homer Simpson territory. The problem was the rollover test, so they lowered the tyre pressures and thinned out the material in the roof to give it a lower centre of gravity. So if you did go round a corner (like they have in European roads) then you could end up crushed to death. But let's not be self-centred, due to the bulk of the vehicle you could also crush the occupants of another vehicle to death. Not a good look.
The eventuality of this is rare, but more likely if the speedometer has been mangled into some Raspberry Pi screen. Try explaining that to the police, insurance company and grieving family members.
The low tyre pressures and the general obesity of the vehicle meant that fuel economy was worst-in-class. This vehicle is therefore the worst type of gas-guzzler, the poster-child-SUV for global warming. They sold these excuses for vehicles as 'trucks' rather than 'cars' as it was a tax fiddle that, combined with the 'Chicken Tax', meant that lousy design was permitted. So much for the 'free market' and 'competition'.
I would say the hacky Raspberry Pi speedometer is well suited to the general hackiness of the vehicle's botched and very American engineering. It is in character, a quick and dirty solution that certainly would not meet EU standards for safety.
A proper mechanic would rip this hacky solution out and put in the correct cable/sensor in minutes. Sometimes you have got to respect the skills people have and wonder why it is they do it properly rather than go for abominable hacks. But this vehicle isn't worthy of a mechanic's time, it needs to be taken out to the scrapyard and replaced with something practical like a planet-friendly bicycle.
In Utah an old car used to pass safety inspection without a speedo. My Dad's old Prism had the speedo die at just over 100k and him and my brother put another 200k (estated) miles on it. Registration renewed every year. Utah dropped the safety inspection requirements last year because no reduction in deaths has happened with it in place. Anything goes now, as long as it can pass emissions.
In the UK it certainly isn't by my interpretation. The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986, Regulation 35 & 36 is relevant.
Regulation 35 does allow compliance with alternative requirement, either Community Directive 75/443 or with ECE Regulation 39. These I am not familiar with, but the Regulation 36 regarding maintenance states:
"Every instrument for indicating speed fitted to a motor vehicle shall be kept free from any obstruction which might prevent its being easily read and shall at all material times be maintained in good working order."
Therefore, the original one would need to be removed to even begin to be legal.
Provided there is enough of a GPS signal to get an accurate position, the GPS speedometer will be far more accurate than the vehicle one that's essentially based on the circumference of the tires.
In 2013, instead of solving real actual problems, the EU were upset that danish cinnamon rolls might have too much cinnamon in them. The ban was avoided by a reclassification of the product.
Stories like this happen with disturbing regularity.
That sounds like the EU were preventing a known toxin from being used in food. The USA also has restrictions on coumarin in food.
Danish food producers were taking the cheap route (Cassia cinnamon rather than the not-dangerous Cinnamomum verum), and rather than requiring the bakers to use less spice or the more expensive one, the Danish government abused the loophole in the law for traditional recipes.
EU probably felt they were justified in their meddling. Meanwhile, we have been eating Danish cinnamon pastries for who knows how long, and by some miracle have not died. And if death by pastry were to become an issue, it would be one [we could solve ourselves](https://www.foedevarestyrelsen.dk/english/Pages/default.aspx).
The entire tyrannical bureaucracy of the EU undoubtedly feel they're doing a great service, while a lot of people feel they're sticking their noses where they don't belong, making problems where none exist to justify their existence.
They wanna ban smoked meats now. I think that and your post makes a lot of sense as there is clear evidence of their damage.
I've moved from EU to NZ and it's kinda nice not to have that stringent regulation. People here has really good common sense, empathy and are quite technically handy. But that came from small population. Most are incredibly racists (tho easier than aussies) and fail to see their own weaknesses...
Really cool hack and fun idea! Some ideas if your only goal is to get a speedometer. Firstly, ditch the pi and use something with much less power usage, such as an ESP32 or Arduino or STM32 whatever. The Pi uses a lot of power. Then use a GPS IC such as the Neo 6M[1], which is cheaper and less power usage than a USB GPS dongle.
The point of having a low-power SoC is that it can stay on while the car is powered off, taking a GPS sample every 10 minutes or so, so that when the car powers on it can very quickly get a lock. The Neo 6M also keeps a memory of the last location which helps it get a lock quickly.
Even relying on GPS is overdoing it. Paint a white stripe on a tire using a permanent marker, and then mount an IR emitter and phototransistor in the wheel well. Knowing the diameter of the tire and the time between revolutions lets you easily figure out speed.
I'd love to build a HUD for my Subaru BRZ like this, but using some kind of HUD. Even just as a speedometer. But I'm not really able to solder/do much wiring since I have hand tremors. It'd be sweet, though.
I did a lot of soldering as a microwave tech, and used a setup like that just for convenience. I have to have a magnifying glass on a similar flex arm because my eyes are so bad. I suppose there are still some hard parts, like trying to use braid to remove solder, but I bet you can do it.
I have a 1991 Mitsubishi Galant VR4 that has a place in my heart that your Subaru seems to have. Cool family compact with 4WD and 500 oversized, at the wheels, turbo HP.
You could definitely achieve something like that with a solderless breadboard, and a raspberry pi with some breakout boards! Maybe an external USB or HDMI display?
I wonder if you could use something like this [0] and feed info from the pi over OBD using some sort of OBDII breakout board or OBDII <-> USB device.
So just point the screen up at the windscreen and use the reflection as a HUD. You'll need to source a very bright screen for daytime use, just as with any HUD.
I've seen electronic speedometers that plug into vehicle OBD2 ports, and I know you can read the vehicle speed and other data using a wireless OBD2 adapter.
Would that not be preferable to this as it'd be a lot more reliable, granted I don't know which cars support them or not but I've seen them working in modern vehicles.
I have been playing with my (spare) Android phone and its GPS to record my location and speed when driving. My guess is when using an app on Android, there are too many variables (from the actual GPS hardware, device ROM settings, app settings, etc.) which are not very easily accessible and likely optimized for different goals.
In my use case (as in the article) only care about GPS readouts when the car is in motion so I don't really care about energy efficiency (within reason, the cigarette lighter thing should be able to safely power the device).
The GPS module manual says it takes about forty seconds for the GPS module to position.
> Once the GPS module is powered on, there is data output
> It usually takes about 40 seconds to be successfully positioned.
> After the positioning is successful, the correct time, latitude and longitude position data will be available.
But the article says:
> GPS is usually acquired within 15-30 seconds of starting (much faster than the cheap electronic speedometers I tested first).
Maybe this does not include the time it takes for the raspberry pi to boot? Maybe the raspberry pi takes an additional thirty seconds to boot and the GPS unit powers on almost simultaneously with the raspberry pi but we don't blame the GPS module for any delay until the raspberry pi boots, logs in, and the Navit application starts?
Or maybe the GPS positions way before forty seconds and the manual is written that way to not be overly optimistic (could never get decent GPS signal when walking in areas with tall skyscrapers on my Android phone a few years back).
This is also exciting because it is modular. When GPS III[1] (hopefully) becomes operational by the end of the decade (The tenth and final GPS Block III launch is projected in Q2 2023 so it should be fully operational/adopted by 2030), you could simply use a new module (in theory at least).
You are right; I didn’t factor in RPi boot time to that figure. I’d guess maybe 60-90 seconds total? By the time I’ve turned the ignition, backed out of the driveway, and put it in drive I have a GPS lock.
You can make a Pi boot much faster than that. The main thing to disable is wait for network available. Other embedded boards I've used eg Rock960 are ssh-able within about 20 seconds or less.
I’ve been watching ChrisFix and Scotty Kilmer in Youtube and while they don’t agree on much both say you should wait a few seconds after starting the car before driving away.
Something about engine oil and lubrications. Probably doesn’t harm anything in the short term but if you have time, probably not a bad idea.
Problem is you can't tell your speed in a tunnel. I propose training a ML model to be able to estimate the distance a camera moved between two input images. You could probably use google street view as training data. Then, instead of relying on fancy satellites, its just a few billion numerical calculations.
I would think Google street view data of tunnels would be a challenge to train on. I’m not aware of standards for distance between lights, and apart from that, they tend to be fairly dark. Also, overtaking often is forbidden inside tunnels, so you can’t easily use the size of road markers, either.
Even if that works, doing sensor fusion with a gyroscope and an accelerometer probably is both easier and cheaper.
This would be interesting to have in my old MG Midget. The center radio console is essentially wasted space, with a 4”x7” speaker grill that could be replaced with a nice monitor. Not sure if I need navigation in it but I’d love to instrument the heck out of the old car.
Is Navit necessary for attaining speed?? Or can one get speed with a geometric formula and GPS data?? Albeit having navit running is nice but would be nice to make a simple LED display of speed instead ;)
You don't need to do any geometry. Your GPS module will simply output the speed.
While you can calculate based on position fixes, it is more accurate for the GPS to do it. It does not do a simple distance/time calculation but can instead look at the phase / doppler shift of the GPS signals. This ends up being much more accurate.
Thanks for the reply; did not think about that and after all that is the crucial characteristic of what allows GPS to work: now does it depend on the GPS module? Or can phase and Doppler shift be accesses regardless of the device?
Every consumer GPS receiver I have seen and even some aerospace-grade receivers that I have (limited) experience with report data over a serial connection as “NMEA sentences”. You can read about them here: https://www.gpsinformation.org/dale/nmea.htm#nmea if it’s a USB GPS receiver, it’s likely internally a USB->serial chip with a GPS receiver communicating over serial. The data that I have seen is always been high-level focused on navigation such as speed in MPH and heading in degrees and of course, long and lag. Not to say that you can’t find a device that reports phase and Doppler shift, this is just how everything I have seen worked. When GPS receivers started getting cheap when I was a kid, I was very excited to experiment with them using Arduinos, etc so hope this helps!
If you want to do anything with GPS modules, some fine and talented people have done the hard work of interfacing with, and parsing the output of a lot of different receivers, and called it `gpsd`.
It definitely depends on the device. You can find a lot of information about Doppler GPS in speed record communities on the internet, e.g. in this speed surfing record tracker:
Another excellent reply! Thank you! This will definitely come in handy for personal projects; like autonomous robots; it helps to have redundant systems and it seems that GPS is more accurate than odometry or accelerometers that suffer from drift
Wow that would be so illegal her in NZ. Nice to know some countries give you the freedom to do stuff like that. Here a spot of rust will take your car off the road. A broken spedo would never be allowed. Even if replaced with GPS.
New Zealand has some of the most sensible inspection standards for any country that has roadworthy standards. Remember that New Zealand has one of the oldest car fleets in the world, since the majority of imported cars are used Japanese cars (NZ imports more used cars than new).
Basically, if your car came with a safety feature, it has to still be there and it has to work. Car had no ABS when new? Doesn't need it. But if it had it, then it has to operate.
As for rust, it needs to be close to structural points in order for your car to fail a WOF. If you have rust near a pillar or on your firewall, there's a good chance it's worse than it looks and a safety hazard. Rust is a cancer for cars, it might not look bad at first, but it will eat your car from the inside out.
Your car basically just has to be safe, that's what your WOF is for. You can modify your car to your hearts content, you just need to get an engineer to sign off on it to say it's safe. Want to stuck a RB25DET in your old ute? No worries, just get a cert.
Then you come to Australia, where each state has a plethora of "anti-hoon" laws, banning you from having both a pod filter and a straight pipe, and other arbitrary rules to stop you from modifying your car. It's ridiculous and also inconsistently enforced, nobody seems to know what the actual rules are here.
Same in the UK - a broken speedo would be an instant illegal get off of the road thing. afterall how do you know you are not breaking the speed limits?
I am not sure what you can get away with for DIY replacements - perhaps a police officer might give you the benefit of the doubt if you were polite and explained it was temporary while you are waiting for the real part, but I really suspect this would force your car off of the road at the next annual safety check/inspection (MOT test in the UK)
Often the limit is way lower than the "safe" speed - e.g. the variable speed limits on motorways restricting you to 40mph on an empty road in perfect daytime conditions, or the 15mph limit for London - both only exist to manage traffic flow and/or dissuade people from driving.
You're welcome to match other drivers - enjoy the speeding tickets you'll both get.
afterall how do you know you are not breaking the speed limits?
Exceeding the speed limit is still illegal even in places where the lack of speedometer is not illegal --- they just don't care how you know your speed.
Exactly. I drove my Alfa Spider for over a decade with an unreliable speedo. I learned the multiplier for third and fifth gear from tach to speed, got a friendly town cop to verify it with his radar gun, and drove that car over 100K miles without ever being stopped for speeding.
> Nice to know some countries give you the freedom to do stuff like that.
There is a good reason this is illegal in most of the world. Not sure why you don't put car safety as a priority? 40,000 people die every year in the US, and over 4 million are seriously injured.
They make esp32 based obd loggers. I have one but I haven’t bothered getting it to work since the obdlink mx+ works well enough for my data logging desires.
