Was talking to a buddy of mine about a recent trip and he's one of those guys that likes to buy and sell constantly. So to him mileage matters and he likes to fix up bikes and re sell them.

Anyways, I told him that I put on about 1500 miles in 4 days and he mentioned that he would have unplugged the speedo to prevent the mileage from going up and this got me curious.

Will this work? If you ride around with the speedo unplugged, does the odometer reading stay the same? Or is there some kind of mechanism that the bike won't start with this unplugged or something.

Not asking if this is legal or not, just curious and having my own version of Mythbusters.

 

Don't know, but it sounds like your friend is wanting to exercise a little odometer fraud. I was steer clear of that conversation like it was the plague.

 

Incidentally, the speedo and trip gauge are usually built into the speed sensor.

 

You obviously didn't read the last sentence of my original post.

 

I think on Sporties it's different. When I changed out my stock speedo, I had to manually set the odometer.

OP, what your friend is telling you can get you in a lot of trouble (ie: fraud, tampering) in any vehicle that is sold.
Also, how would you like to be the buyer of one of these kinds of bikes? Not very fun.

 

Nope, read the whole thing. I was just saying that I would steer clear of the entire conversation, if it were me. That being said, you are your own boss, do what you will.

 

The odometer should be stored in the gauge, but run off the same sensor. Could be wrong though.

 

just go around the block and see if it worked. Good to know, more we know about our babies, the better.

 

Just to be clear, I'm in no way advocating odometer fraud or anything but simply trying to see if unplugging the speedo with disable the odometer counter. That's it...simple science project.

Don't worry about the legal and morality aspects as I'll make my own judgement and if that happens to be wrong, I'll pay the price for it. Implementing the above is illegal and immoral...but last time I checked, I didn't get the memo that we couldn't discuss it and theorize about it.

 

Jumped around a couple of sites and was able to get some info. Not sure if it's 100% accurate, but you CAN run without the speedo being plugged in. The Odometer will NOT show the incurred mileage; however, the true mileage is stored in the ECM and can be found out at the dealership with their diagnostic tools.

When you think of it, it would be a really bad design choice to have the entire bike go down if the speedo had a fault!