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Speedo Blues

Date:
By Wom Battle

If you had a spare hour to read my recount of yesterday's ride you may have noted the confusion over the number of K's I actually travelled.  I often take a GPS receiver with me to log my journeys and help create the ride maps you may have seen elsewhere on the site.

Doing this with my 1998 Road King wasn't an issue because the speedometer reading and the GPS calculation of distance was always so close that it wasn't an issue.  The 2009 model though over the 446 K's I travelled yesterday clocked up 485.1 k's.  OK, so it reads faster than I'm going so perhaps I'm less likely to get a speeding ticket, but nearly 10% out isn't good enough for me.  Here's some reasons.

  1. I'm doing a salary sacrifice/novated lease on the machine, Fringe Benefit s Taxes are calculated on kilometres travelled.  So with the speedo clocking up more than I'm doing, I'm going to pay more tax than I should be, who want's to do that?
  2. The 2009 Road King should be serviced every 8000k's, if I go by the speedo I'll be getting it serviced every 7,356k's, good for the service provider, bad for my pocket.
  3. Say I average 10,000 k's per year, when I sell the bike in 5 years @ 50,000 k's on the clock it'll only have done less than 46,000 k's. If I was looking for a second hand bike I'd take the one with 4,000 k's less, so my resale will be hurt.
  4. I'll need to check if it uses the speedo readings to determine the distance to empty for fuel,  mmmmm. If it does, my fuel economy will be much better than it really is.

Upside though, I'm getting more HOG miles at the moment, because a HOG mile is a little over 9/10ths of a real mile.

I've raised the issue with the dealer who can hopefully sort it out when I take it in for it's first service next weekthat's supposed to be at 1,000 miles (1600 k's). The speedo says 1699 k's so that means I've actually only done 1562k's so it's not due for the service yet..... or is it?

 

Disclaimer: This non commercial website and its content is not affiliated with or associated in any way with the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Harley-Davidson Australia, the Harley-Davidson Owners Group® or any Harley-Davidson® Dealers in Australia.  The use of the terms Harley-Davidson, and Road King® are unavoidable because that's what I own and ride.  This website,  called "My Harley Davidson" , and any opinions or comments expressed herein are purely about my Harley-Davidson Road King ownership experience, a truly great experience at that. I have no intention whatsoever to infringe on any trademarks or copyright ownership of the Harley-Davidson Motor Company or anyone else.


March 2024
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