When you finish a drive and open your trip stats, there are usually two speed figures waiting: your top speed for the trip and your average speed. They can tell very different stories about the same journey, and understanding which one matters more — and when — changes how you interpret your own driving data in a meaningful way.
What top speed actually tells you
Your top speed is the highest instantaneous velocity you reached during the trip, even if that peak lasted for a single second on a downhill stretch of empty motorway. It's the most emotionally satisfying number — it tells you how fast the vehicle went — but it's arguably the least useful for understanding the character of a journey overall. Two drivers can record identical top speeds on the same road while having completely different experiences: one reached that figure briefly and smoothly on a long straight, the other hit it after a hard sprint followed by heavy braking.
Top speed does have legitimate uses. For performance verification on a closed circuit or proving ground, it characterises the vehicle's capability. For comparing the same driver on the same known road on different days, a change in top speed is meaningful data. But for everyday trips on public roads, it's a single data point from a single moment that reveals almost nothing about the remaining 99% of the drive.
Why average speed is more honest
Average speed over a journey reflects how the whole trip went: how long you spent moving versus stopped, how much of it was fast open road versus urban crawl, and how efficiently you maintained pace relative to the conditions. It's the equivalent of a runner's average pace per kilometre — it describes the shape of the entire effort, not the peak of one sprint.
For comparing two routes between the same origin and destination, average speed is the decisive metric. A motorway route with a higher top speed but heavy traffic may deliver a lower average speed than a quieter A-road where you maintain 80 km/h with no holdups. That comparison is invisible if you only look at the peak figure.
Moving average vs. total-time average
There is a subtlety worth knowing. Some apps calculate average speed over moving time only — ignoring stops — while others average over the total trip duration including traffic jams and red lights. These produce very different numbers and neither is wrong, but they answer different questions. Moving average tells you how fast you were travelling while in motion; total average tells you how much of your time was genuinely productive travel. PACE shows both figures so you can understand what your route really cost you in time, not just distance.
The athlete parallel
Runners and cyclists learned long ago that pace is more useful than max speed for understanding performance. An athlete who spikes at 25 km/h for ten seconds has learned nothing about their fitness; one who maintained 15 km/h for two hours has learned a great deal. The same principle applies to driving — your average pace over a long run, and how consistent that pace was, reveals your skill and the road's quality far better than any single peak reading.
How driving scores weight the two metrics
A well-designed driving rating uses top speed only indirectly, primarily as a sanity check against unusual events. The heavier weighting goes to consistency: how smooth was the acceleration, how progressive was the braking, how close to steady was the average on a given road type. A driver who maintained a smooth 90 km/h on an open country road will outscore one who oscillated between 70 and 120 km/h with the same average — even if the latter posted a higher peak. Use a trip tracker to review both figures side by side and let the pattern guide your technique over time.
What to aim for
The most efficient driving tends to produce a high moving average relative to the posted limit, a low number of large speed oscillations, and a top speed that doesn't dwarf the average by a huge margin. If your top speed is consistently three or four times your average, that is the signature of a lot of hard acceleration followed by braking — either unavoidable urban driving or an unnecessarily aggressive style on open roads. Either way, the gap between the two numbers is the data point worth investigating.