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Member
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: Livingston County
Posts: 71
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Member
Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: Livingston County
Posts: 71
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I know this is an old thread but just general info on changing odometers nowadays:
-Tools to change odometers for all makes/models/years of vehicles are very cheap nowadays. The more difficult ones to change are EU vehicles, especially BMW and Mercedes, but even those are quite possible.
-Odometer can be changed in almost all vehicles (especially Japanese and USA brand vehicles) without leaving any evidence that it has been changed.
Due to this, it is up to the buyer to get service records and verify them. If the records do not show a consistently progressing mileage vs. time, the vehicle is suspect. If there is a large gap in service history, the vehicle is suspect.
Nearly 100% of sellers with that low mileage vehicle claiming that "it sat in some old lady's garage for the last 10 years" IMO is trying to sell you a vehicle with the odometer rolled back. I am in the Detroit area and this practice is incredibly common here, especially among non, *ahem*, American sellers.
I would strongly recommend that no one pay a higher price for a lower mileage vehicle from any seller, dealer or otherwise, if you can not positively verify as I have mentioned above. This odometer fraud is far more common than any of the related news articles have claimed, there are entire forums dedicated to automotive tuning/module hacking and there are dozens of people a day posting memory dumps from modules asking for the mileage to be changed to some low number. These are just the people who aren't willing to spend a little extra money to do the odometer change all by themselves.
That's my two cents. I had no idea how easy it was to change an odometer until I swapped an upgraded dash cluster in a 2010's EU car and then realized that one of the chinese tools I had contained a menu option to change the mileage.... Enter new mileage->Write->Done. I could have set it to a lower number, cleared any codes in any modules that referenced what mileage the code was set at, and any evidence that I had changed the odometer would have been gone. The modules in some newer high end cars (such as infotainment modules) have what is more or less a "hidden odometer" and people have figured out how to change even those!!!
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