Originally posted by: steppinthrax
There are a couple of things to watch out for to see if the mileage is fraudulent.
1. Look at the driver's seat is it worn out. If you ever look at a high mileage car the driver's seat is always compressed.
No, not always. My 951 has over 160,000 miles and the driver's seat isn't compressed. The leather on both seats has aged and is cracking a little, but the seat hasn't compressed. I've also seen cars with 30,000 miles that were only a couple years old that had compressed seats because the driver was a lardass. He'll want to look at the condition of the leather, not whether it's compressed. Cloth is harder to tell, but should still give wear indicators.
Originally posted by: steppinthrax
2. Look at the odometer are the numbers all lined up perfectly.
Even when never tampered with, a mechanical odometer will rarely like up perfectly.
Examples:
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Originally posted by: steppinthrax
3. Look at the engine compartment and underbody. In this case with that mileage the car should look practically new with moderate weathering on the body.
This is much more dependent on how the car has been stored and cared for than how many miles it has on it. Especially when you're talking about the difference between 69,000 miles and maybe 169,000 miles. If the car has been kept outside and isn't washed often, it can look old and weathered in as few as 15,000 miles. If it's kept in a garage and washed all the time, it can look brand new after 100,000+ miles. It's important to check this out, but it's not an indication of age, it's an indication of the care that the car received.
Originally posted by: steppinthrax
There are cars on the road for example where the odometer has been rolled back and there is absolutley no way to prove it. Esp. on the electronic odometers. Which are easier.
Since the mid-1980's, most odometers, even those with a mechanical display, are electrically-driven. The speedometer/odometer on a 1994 Ford will certainly be electromechanical. This means that the speedometer has no cable, just an electrical input for a speed impulse sender, which transmits a series of pulses that increase in frequency with an increase in the speed of the transmission output shaft. This signal is processed by the speedometer/odometer unit into a speed signal and the gauge and odometer are then driven by a small electric motor, at which point the speedometer operates in the traditional fashion.
The basic upshot of the electro-mechanical speedometer is that it then becomes impossible to "roll back" the odometer simply by removing it and spinning the cable backwards. In fact, since the impulse sender doesn't care which direction the transmission output shaft spins, the odometer will continue to count
up even when the car is being driven in reverse. Rolling back this type of speedometer requires rolling it so far
forward that it "turns over". Certainly possible, but much more complicated (to rig up a device to mimic the exact signal from the impulse sender) and time consuming (to roll forward past 999,999 miles) than the older pure mechanical type or the newer completely electronic type where mileage is stored as a binary value somewhere in the gauge cluster and in the ECU.
ZV
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