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Question on odometers!

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alevasseur14

alevasseur14

Golden Member
I received the title to my car in the mail today and as I was looking it over, on the back it had a box for a dealer to say the odometer is wrong. It got me thinking about it and I wanted to ask you guys how a dealer (or anyone, really) would know an odometer has been tampered with?

I know it can be done but for some reason thought that only applied to much older cars. What sort of anti-tampering methods do auto odometers use? I can imagine it'd be much harder to do with an electronic display but many cars still have the 'classic' dials.

Seeing my title made me think of this question and I wanted to bounce it off the minds... Discuss!
 
The odometer on my bike is wrong because the cluster was replaced. It doesn't necessarily mean that the existing one has been tampered with. 🙂
 
Good point. The odometer on my snowmobile doesn't show the first 2k miles. I had to replace it after an incident...

So was my hunch that its possible/easier with older cars correct? I feel like there has to be someone who would want to roll back their odometer... like Bueller.

My 'new' car shows 137k on the odometer. Come to think of it, the body shows 137k too! I have no reason to doubt it.
 
Can-bus controller froze up on my new Jeep. All sorts of malfunctions while on the road. Only thing that worked was the gas gauge and the engine. Even the turn signals quit. Odometer quit counting the miles for a while. Got back home, removed the negative battery cable. All back to normal, but it never counted those miles.
 
As said its mostly, now, for when it was replaced. Older ones could be turned back and was mroe common.
Also a small problem with rental trucks that charge by mile. Some will remove the speed sensor wire so it does not read the milage. Reconnect and disconnect the battery and you just save hundreds of dollars depending on how you drive. One reason many now go for unlimited milage due to damage.
 
Could have also been equipped with wheels either larger, or smaller, than what the odometer was calibrated for. If you ran wheels that were 10% larger the odometer would rack up only 90% of the miles driven.
 
As others have said, it's almost exclusively for repair/replacement. For example, the odometer on my '86 951 quit working a while back; one of the plastic gears has a known issue where it degrades into effectively jell-o and gets stripped. I replaced the gear and the odometer now works, but it's off by about 2,000 miles (it stopped working at the beginning of a long road trip and I couldn't fix it until I got home).

It's actually not all that easy to roll back even the dial odometers in modern gauges. The gauge in my 951 had the "old fashioned" dials, but they were driven electronically by a stepper motor based on electric pulses from a speed sensor. That means there's no speedo cable to spin backwards and even if you put the car in reverse, the pulses stay the same so it still counts up. The only way to tamper would be to remove the cluster and painstakingly dis-assemble the gauge, which, having done just that to replace the gear, I can say is not a quick and easy process. Even then you'd still need to spin the dial back by hand, which would take forever.

Older cars with a pure mechanical setup are likely easier to tamper with, but it's really not a big issue for most new cars. Even most pure mechanical setups had some form of disconnect so they didn't remove miles when the car was in reverse though.

ZV
 
My bike odo will also be reset if the cluster is reset, but the ECM on the bike will retain the accurate mileage and hours meter of the original cluster + new mileage of the new cluster going forward.
 
Strangely, modern VW/Audi Odomoters can be manipulated quite easily using a computer and the right cable.

However, if you change the number of miles it automatically flags that in the system and you cannot remove the flag
 
Thanks for all the input, guys! I figured the box was on the title was only there in case the odometer had been tampered with. Thanks to you all, I know now that there are definitely legitimate reasons too!
 
My friends 95 Eclipse GS-T had a bad speed sensor, which kept the odometer from counting up. He guesstimates he had over 120k miles on it, but sold the car with 82K on the dash, with a fixed speed sensor of course.

It's kind of messed up, but he babied the hell out of the car and maintained it really well. He didn't sell it for much money anyway.
 
I rolled the odometer in my 89 caravan back to 0 when I rebuilt my engine. Mainly did it as a goof since I had the cluster out anyway to install real water temp and oil pressure gauges. It has a book value of $400 so I'm not too concerned about that causing a problem when I go to sell it. When I do sell it it will probably be to a junkyard anyway.
 
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