[Afty]

I think it has the *potential* to be very accurate, but Nissan purposely makes it read a bit fast for our safety. Other car makers do this too; there was an article about it in C&D a few months ago. Interestingly, BMW had the least accurate speedometers in C&D's test.

 

[Afty]

So let's say the speedo is off by 10%. I'm going at 60mph for an hour but only really travelled 54 miles. But my speedo say that I travelled 60. I just got rip off 6 miles. That means I have to service my car earlier than I really have to and my resale just sucked because of the extra mileage.

Not true, because the odo and speedo don't necessarily agree. Or at least that's what Car and Driver said. They found that on the whole odometers were very accurate (with Nissans being the most accurate of any car make tested), even though speedometers read too fast. I think the average Nissan's odometer was accurate to 1 mile for every 1000 miles travelled.

Check out the article here:
http://www.caranddriver.com/xp/Caranddriver/features/2002/april/200204_feature_speedometer.xml