FLASHED BY SPEED CAMERA - will i be fined?

Lol Minardi just saw this on Lings cars!

"mmm, you should note this Fiat Panda euroNCAP safety test is a bit stricter than the Chinese crash test.

Chinese test involves a sack of rice, a rickshaw, a policeman blowing a whistle and a red flag. Every car passes that test, the rickshaw driver always dies... and Chinese-made cars always get 5 stars! - Ling"

It is so good! Remember it from Dragons Den and the Dragons being like WTF!?

Not exactly. They must either be 100% on, or over read by 10%. The latter is easier for manufacturers to achieve. Get someone with a Sat Nav (Tom Tom) to sit in your car. The speed reading from those is dead on balls accurate. There are other programs available that can measure your speed to two decimal places. It is a common misconception that the speed on these is calculated by averaging the distance moved in a certain period of time, but it is actually calculated by the Doppler shift of the device (in the vehicle in motion) relative to the satellites

'Fraid not. GPS is not the be all and end all when it comes to accuracy with speeds. I bought my GPS and sat it on the windowsill and it told me I was doing 14mph for a good 30 seconds. My wrist mounted GPS had some interesting spikes when I was sailing (including height jumps of up to 40ft). I know some very experienced sailors who consider the speed reading of a GPS too inaccurate to provide meaningful feedback on boat speed. I don't know if you can get the track log from a TomTom but it can be interesting to look at. It's not as accurate as you might think.

This can be the case if it doesn't have a strong signal to a number of satellites. I have experienced this occasionally when stationary, but in motion I have found it to perform well

Also depending on conditions, the GPS altimeter is not very accurate, since the GPS altitude technology works on the theory that the Earth is a perfect sphere.

I don't get the tracklogs from Tom Tom, I use Memory Map and they have been relatively smooth. The altitude readings are also useful if you use them as a rough guide - on aircraft for example.

Marcus

I have had 12 points for 2 years now!

Used none of them!

You've not exchanged them for air-miles, free 'top-up' lessons, or funky dashboard-dice?

Shame on you.

I think there is a difference between high quality, expensive GPS units and the GPS us mere citizens use.

I use GPS as part of my GIS project in Geography and it is 100x more accurate than any other alternative, but then my unit that i use is worth well over £1000, a bit more than a TT and the unit has to be accurate, so it has three tuners and then avgs out.

I think civil GPS is somewhat inaccurate, but only because the technology used is not as advanced as other GPS systems.

However, it is still more accurate for the average joe bloggs.

This would be a differential GPS which has two or more widely spaced antennae, right? You are correct in that consumer GPS is out in the order of +/- 10 ft horizontally and +/- 50 ft vertically, however, when travelling at steady speeds it is still very accurate.

Marcus

Oh i totally agree, GPS is still the most accurate measure in a car, by far.

if u were doing 48 in a 40 at night, there could of been someone step out infront of you or an animal and you could of hit it causing a serious accident or death to a person/animal, so you deserve the points.

That could happen if she was doing 30 in the middle of day. Or if she was doing the speed limit anywhere - anything could happen. On a motorway are you going to crawl along just in case an animal decides to try to cross? Of course not. It could happen anywhere, you're not going to give people points for doing the limit on a motorway because they could harm someone/thing are you?