American hops in his wife's beloved Volkswagen Atlas and is immediately confused by the speedometer

This American guy couldn’t work out what was going on with his wife’s Volkswagen Atlas.

Specifically, he couldn’t figure out what was going on with the speedometer.

His wife made it clear she’s not getting rid of the car, so he’s going to have to get used to it.

But there’s actually an explanation behind this.

DISCOVER SBX CARS: The global premium car auction platform powered by Supercar Blondie

The reason why the Volkswagen Atlas has this unusual speedometer

This American guy who goes by YoungLawyer (so maybe he’s also a lawyer) on TikTok shared a clip on the platform asking people to help him with his wife’s Volkswagen Atlas’ speedometer.

The speedometer appears to have two sets of numbers, and none of that made much sense to YoungLawyer.

“Math is not mathing here,” he said in video.

The explanation is relatively simple, though.

One TikTok commenter in particular hit the nail right in the head.

“It’s not because it’s kph, it’s because they want to use the same gauge for kph and mph and the font would be too small if you used 10 unit major increments all the way through the range.

“It is weird they have two different range increments. It’s probably they just wanted highway speeds for both kph and mph to be near the top,” the comment read.

And that’s exactly right.

This is a solution that manufacturers that sell cars globally occasionally adopt, probably as a way to save money since this means they don’t have to design and manufacture two different speedometers for countries that use miles and kilometers.

But, understandably, it didn’t make much to this American guy.

It’s still an unusual decision

The Volkswagen Atlas (no relation with to a super cool off-roader that uses the same name) is indeed designed both for markets that use miles and markets that use kilometers.

Even so, this choice is still a little unusual.

The Atlas replaced the Touareg, which was also available just about everywhere and didn’t use the odd speedometer.

It shares a bunch of components with a lot of vehicles in the VW family, including some Audis, some Cupras and of course a long list of VW vehicles.

And most of those vehicles use different dashboards depending on where they’re sold.

Either way, this problem won’t stay a problem for much longer considering pretty much all modern cars have digital dashboards.

Click the star icon next to supercarblondie.com in Google Search to stay ahead of the curve of the latest and greatest supercars, hypercars, and ground-breaking technology.