BW wrote:
I finally broke down and bought a new buick, 05 LeSabre, and got rid of my
old car with more miles than I care to think of.

I just picked up the new one and drove from Florida to MA, a trip I've taken
at least 20 times with 4 different vehicles. The milage has ALWAYS been 1245
+/- 10 miles. Most times it's within 2-3 miles (a creature of habit I guess.
Same places for gas, same hotel, same restaurants).

The new car read 1321 miles and when I spoke with the local dealer up here
says he hasn't heard of any problems like this.

Anybody heard of similar problems with GM products ? I'd like to have some
info before it goes into the shop.

Thanks,

BW



I started thinking maybe low tire pressure and a smaller rolling radius.
And then my brain kicked in and realized it's the circumferance of the
tire that matters, and with belted radials that won't change much at all
with tire pressure, will it, or am I "smoking the drapes" again with that?

Interesting to hear that a dealer can recalibrate the car's computer to
correct things like that. I wonder if there are two separate
corrections, one for indicated speed and another for milage.

I've noticed that my GM car doesn't know whether it's going forwards or
backwards. Moving in reverse still makes the odometer increase and the
speedometer inticate a positive speed number. G

That kind of calibratable odometer would have been nice to have back in
the early '60s when the first SWMBO and I went sports car rallying
nearly every Sunday for several years. We had to calculate and
incorporate a "correction factor" to match our odometer to that of the
"Rallymaster" who set up the event, by driving over a their measured
distance at the start of each rally.

I still have the Curta calculator we used for those rallies, and (metal
content here) the motorized drive I built to crank it through it's
bottom. It snapped around one full turn each time a microswitch geared
down from the speedometer cable clicked off another hundredth of a mile.

Thanks for the mammaries, and don't laff at the '55 Chrysler in the
photo link below. Superior technology helped us beat out the teams in
the real "sporty cars".

http://home.comcast.net/~jwisnia18/temp/rallying.jpg

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia

(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented."