Switching between 3 basic sport modes – Green mode, Mid mode and Sport mode – leads to an automatic speedometer color change, in sequence from green, through white to red. To switch between them easily, you can use the driving dynamic selector button on the console panel.

speedometer is inaccurate
Slight speed misreadings are something you must be familiar with, whether from your own experience or your fellow colleagues. Not to diminish your driving comfort issue, but this issue is widely spread on multiple car brands, including Honda, Doge, Audi or Volvo, and is in fact established as a legislated error worldwide.

To brief you on this ‘issue’, all OEM speedometer are made to over-read your actual speed to compensate for different wheels and tire combinations. As you can probably guess, the speed of the point farthest from the center of the wheel will differ after replacing your old 15’’ for new 18’’ wheels, and regardless, will always be impossible to read when cornering. Your car uses numerous sensors to determine speed, however, because this parameter depends on many factors – the value shown on your speedo is as accurate as it can be.

Due to all the variables, clusters are calibrated for a 10% margin of the speedo error, so for instance, when going 70 mph your speedo reading can reach up to 77 mph. This is obviously an extreme case, as speedos usually hold a 3-5% discrepancy in speed reading, but if it does happen to you, remember it’s a standard margin required as a precaution. The indicated reading, however, must never be less than the actual speed, to avoid an inadvertent speed caused by an incorrect speedometer reading.

What you may have also come across is that the odometer and OBD readings are more accurate. That’s because they are directly linked into MINI’s CANBUS system which stores the actual ‘raw’ information from different sensors around the car. So, when the speed signal from the vehicle’s ABS comes out of the ABS modulator ECU, it is then processed by the MINI Cooper speedo system, which makes all necessary calculations to run at the legislative tolerances required for speedometers.

How to recalibrate the speedometer?
Since the 10% margin error in speed reading is not defective, speedometer calibration is not possible. What you may do though is compare your actual speed with the one shown by the speedo while performing various speed tests with your GPS turned on. The divergence of GPS/speedo readings should always hold at the same percentage – i.e 20 mph indicated is 18.4 in GPS, 40 mph indicated is 36.8 mph, etc. This way you can easily calculate your actual speed at a glance.

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