Clinometers?

[SwamiSalami]

Has anybody tried to use a clinometer (measures roll/pitch) to assist with efficiency? I guess their most common use is for people who off road and rock crawl to monitor their vehicle's position as a safety measure. Seems like it would help to identify uphill/downhill gradients even the ones that are hard to see or down right invisible to the naked eye!

Found a few on Amazon, but thought I'd ask before I unwittingly wasted 20$.

Any thoughts or experiences are appreciated.

[fusion210]

I thought of using one as well to judge my ability to coast.

I forget where I saw it, but someone just put a bubble level on their driver side door to judge it. You could even tune it to show when you can coast long distances although you'll still have the differences in road surface and other conditions. Not as cool, but these things are cheap - free.

[dirtydave]

You can do this with a nice smart phone too.

Torque + countless other apps in the playstore do this.

[oldtamiyaphile]

Your load/vacuum gauge does a pretty good job of telling you if you're on an incline.

[2000mc]

I'm thinking you would want a resolution of about .1degrees to really give you any relevant info. The $20 ones seem like it would be a challenge to read 1 degree. Building your own might be a better option, maybe a tall pendulum... Idk where you would put it though. idk how they work in planes but I would think any speed change would throw them off

[MeteorGray]

I use a simple RV-type level gauge above the driver's door of my diesel F250 tow vehicle. It's not precise enough to do anything but to confirm what my exhaust gas temperature gauge and boost gauge have already indicated, whether I'm going up or down. However, it's worth the $2 I invested in it as it does show roughly the extremity of the hill, ie whether it's a 5 degree or a 10 degree hill, etc. More than once I've looked at the gauge to see why my EGTs or boost have changed, as sometimes gradual gradients are hard to discern.

[CVTCivic]

I also thought about buying one of these mechanical clinometers but then I decided these things are too big for my small car and most of them don't have good customer reviews at all.

In certain situations it makes it for me easier to see if I'm on an incline.






So I use an android clinometer app, which is made for offroad driving, it's called 'offroad inclinometer'.

[CVTCivic]

The app I previously recomended is not as good as I thougt.
It's not very accurate when driving at higher speeds. I think it's only good for slow offroad driving. That's why they named it so.

Here's a short video, where you can see how bad it works:



Link to GIF:
https://s5.gifyu.com/images/gif23mb.gif

[teoman]

Most modern (last decade) vehicles reporta that information over the obd2 protocol

[Xist]

Rollover rollover rollover!