false odometer readings

Tomsk

Tomsk

Tomsk

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My car is on it's last wheels so I've been looking through the adverts for a replacement. I can understand that many motor traders always put disclaimers about the number of miles a car has done to protect themselves.

All the cars I've been looking at are 5 or less years old and have LCD/LED/Fluorescent digital odometers.
Is it really that easy to 'clock' a newish car these days?
 
Not sure how easy it is to falsify the mileages, but you can check the MOT mileages registered online, can't really go wrong that way.
 
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A lot of them just have standard EEPROMs (24LC*) for mileage storage, which are very easy to overwrite if you know what you're doing.

There is usually some encoding to try and make it harder, but it only takes one person to crack it.
 
it's a piece of pee to re-code mileages, look at the overall state of the car, the history etc.. before paying any attention to the mileage, that's what i do :)
 
Will Gill said:
it's a piece of pee to re-code mileages, look at the overall state of the car, the history etc.. before paying any attention to the mileage, that's what i do :)
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That's what I'm doing. I was just curious as to how easy or hard it was to clock an electronic odometer.
 
Tomsk said:
That's what I'm doing. I was just curious as to how easy or hard it was to clock an electronic odometer.
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I could change mine to whatever I wanted within 3 minutes, and I'm including the time it takes to boot up my aging serial port equipped coding laptop :p
 
Really not difficult with most, but pretty easy to get a good feel for whether the mileage is real or not with some basic checks and a general assessment of the owner
 
Worryingly I somehow managed to knock about 900 miles off mine after I'd disconnected the battery to do some work on the car. :confused:

Didn't intend it obviously, and whilst I don't think the previous owner knew about this it made me wonder if it had happened before and how many times :p

But the miles were definitely gone.
 
Never seen that before. What car was it?

Ive wondered how cars manage to remember after being disconnected for so long. Wonder if the clocks have a cmos battery thing
 
I bought a car last year that showed 130k, when I checked the previous MOT's I would say 270k is a better guess, luckily I paid peanuts for it and intended to run it into the ground so didn't care, the ability to look up previous MOT's is very useful.
 
Matt82 said:
Never seen that before. What car was it?

Ive wondered how cars manage to remember after being disconnected for so long. Wonder if the clocks have a cmos battery thing
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MK2 MX5. I've disconnected the battery since a couple of times and its been fine. :p

The amount that got knocked off was all the miles I'd done between buying the car and the first time I disconnected the battery.
 
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