this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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It's not really that reliable as it it will depend on the diameter of the wheels that can vary with pressure, wear, and and actual tyre size.
A better method may be a sensor like the one used in optical mice.
I have test all three methods. GPS is the best, but it has drop outs. You can add an inertial gyro system to compensate, but that becomes sloppy the longer it goes without GPS.
The tire method has a lot of variances, but the measure at the transmission is often worse.
So if I replace the wheels on my car with monster truck wheels, I'll be able to cheat the odometer?
Well yeah. My bicycle odemeter has settings for different size wheels.
We used to take vehicles in for calibration and then all runs had to use the same psi in the tires.
...but what are we actually trying to measure here? The miles travelled, or the wear and tear that's caused by the wheels spinning?
Mileage by counting the number of rotation of the wheel.
The mileage is a measurement to give an idea of the wear, combined with other information to give a holistic view of the state of the car.
Fair, and thinking about it it doesn't account for unnecessary wheelspin
It absolutely does. Typically, all 4 wheel speed sensors are polled and averaged, so unless you're doing lots of extended 4 wheel burnouts, you're talking an incredibly small margin of additional error.