Hello everyone. New to the F150 world. Dont let the username scare you and no I was not compensating for anything .

My wife and I just bought an '04 Supercrew about a month ago and realized that our speedometer is not correct. We paced the truck today and found a 4mph difference at 70 mph between our F150 and our Civic (yeah, not only do I have a GM product, I also have an import too). The Civic is pretty accurate according to our local radar postings but Ford tells me that the calibration is correct. My question is...

Is a 5-6% margin or error on the speedometer within Ford specs? Are you guys seeing this much variation in your speedo reading? I've calculated this to cost me about 2160 miles of warranty at 36,000 miles.

Vehicle info:

2004 F150 Supercrew
4.6L
Base XLT trim

 

vetteNoob,

Would love to have one of the old classic's (pre-63).

Yes mine was that far off from the factory too. I corrected mine with a Superchips tuner. That was not the main reason for going with a chip, but was a added benny.

Good luck with your F-150, I know you will enjoy it.
And a chip and exhaust and intake mods will really wake up the power under the hood.

Gene

 

Thanks for th info.

I just cant believe Ford thinks that it is "correct". I guess I'll be getting a Superchip to correct the problem myself.

 

Don't believe the radar buggies. We have two in my town and I had the same idea as you, but I discovered they read different speeds! After all, they are just to scare you and aren't calibrated all that well. On top of that, I know for a fact that my Civic's speedometer reads 3-4 mph too high. Yours might too.

Do you have a friend with a GPS? That's probably the best way to test your speedometer other than a measured mile and a stopwatch. I actually just double-checked mine today after swapping in an OEM tach cluster on my 95 5.0L supercab. It was dead on as far as I could tell all the way up to 60mph.

 

If you have stock tires & rims.....the gauge should be pretty much dead on...after all, its all electronic these days.

Last check I did with my GPSr and my truck, the speedo may have been off maybe 1 MPH (hard to tell because the scale doesn't go below 5 MPH).

Tony

 

Thanks guys. I guess I'll just keep an eye on it until I get a Superchip. I'm still leaning on it being wrong, based on the pacing we did with the Civic and just the flow of traffic, but Im not going to argue with Ford about it.

It just added to my PO scaled that the 2600 mile truck is already in the shop due to an intermittant Passenger SRS warning light problem and losing the dash cluster lumination.

Guess it is a good thing I have an extended warranty ...