60° is the bottom end-stop on the gauge, it won't register anything cooler. So when you start off, the engine is cold, and by the time it reaches 60° it is already warming up quite fast and will reach 90° quite quickly. 90° is the normal operating temperature of the engine, and the gauge is designed so that is in the middle of the range, with the needle upright - makes it easier to see if it is off the mark when you scan the dials. 90° is where it should stay.
That is normal, on a recent trip down south it hung around the 75 mark. This is because of more cold air coming in the front.
ToledoNorthEat wrote
That is normal, on a recent trip down south it hung around the 75 mark. This is because of more cold air coming in the front.
What you describe is not normal behaviour, and if your gauge is reading correctly I'd suspect you have a faulty thermostat, stuck open or opening early, or a faulty thermoswitch causing the radiator fans to come on at too low a temperature. The engine should warm up to 90° and stay there.
However since the gauge on the dash reads a different sensor to the one feeding the ECU, it could just be the sensor. Both gauge and ECU sensors are potted in the same unit, the coolant temperature sensor (CTS) that sems to fail quite frequently from the posts we see on the forum.
That is normal, on a recent trip down south it hung around the 75 mark. This is because of more cold air coming in the front.
What you describe is not normal behaviour, and if your gauge is reading correctly I'd suspect you have a faulty thermostat, stuck open or opening early, or a faulty thermoswitch causing the radiator fans to come on at too low a temperature. The engine should warm up to 90° and stay there.
However since the gauge on the dash reads a different sensor to the one feeding the ECU, it could just be the sensor. Both gauge and ECU sensors are potted in the same unit, the coolant temperature sensor (CTS) that sems to fail quite frequently from the posts we see on the forum.
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