Digital odometer fraud

OK digital dash mechanics,

Thoughts on this?

Kinda scary!

https://fox2now.com/news/contact-2/...medium=social&utm_content=share-link

if the car has been to a reputable shop it's mileage is recorded which is where the car fax comes in. Problem is a lot of smaller shops do not do so : I was also under the impression that the mileage was recorded and stored ourside of the instrument cluster ?

Back when I was working for Ma Mopar 2007-2008 we were told the mileage was stored in the ECM, cluster and one other module. If you replaced one module, the other two had to agree and the new module would receive the correct number of miles. There was exceptions (Neon for example) but that was an older car by then. There were situations when that factory touch screen scan tool had to be used to input some information.

Unless Mopar has changed things, the odds of changing an odo are damn slim. And I doubt they changed things.

I'm gonna guess it's GM vehicles. Buddy of mine bought a Tahoe a year or so ago for cash and found out the 72,XXX was really 172,XXX. It was a Nebraska car, mileage was on the title. When he took the title to the SoS here they saw the title had been altered.

On GM trucks the mileage is supposedly only stored in the dash unit.

I wanted to change the standard instrument cluster in my '08 Magnum to one that had EVIC and was told by "everybody" that the foreign cluster would be rejected, the engine wouldn't start, etc. After installing a wrecking yard cluster with EVIC everything worked as before but the odometer mileage was way off i.e. my car had 92K and the replacement cluster had 148K. I purchased an MT401 programmer from OLDPROG Technology and reset the odometer via the OBD port to match my true mileage.

Only hitch was the steering wheel buttons wouldn't work until activated using the Appcar app...ditto for the Homelink that I also added. Been through California Smog Check several times since then and no anomalies were detected. Smog Check on my year is done totally through the computer, no tailpipe sniff.

It sounds to me like Carfax is pushing a non problem to the press to increase it's report sales.

Quote "CARFAX recommends that people looking to buy a used car use the company’s vehicle history reports and have a trusted, trained mechanic check out the car before buying."

But then I am skeptical of everything news or internet reports.

The maxisys scanner I have can do it all, I can swap in a different engine and program the ECU to match the dash and I can program in the VIN from the car, I can also swap in a dash and correct the miles to the truck or car. No matter what they do to try to keep people from "fixing" miles someone will hack it and commit fraud. I always always tell people who are looking at cars to ignore the miles and buy the car based on the condition of the car. Car fax is better than checking miles because you can see if the car is from a state that builds cars (they salt the roads to get rid of the cars and sell more new ones). I was trying to find a handicap van for my ant and I kept trying to get one in LA Phoenix Vegas and kept finding great deals but they ha all spent the first 5 years or so of their life in places like buffalo, millwakie, chicago... those places down south were laundering rusty cars from up north. We finally found here one in Phoenix from Phoenix and it had more miles but was much nicer underneath than all the newer lower miles units we kept finding.

C4 Corvettes store it in the BCM. Every one does it differently.

Luckily I buy cars at an age that not many people give a crap about the mileage anyway

I've heard of a few digital odometers that reset themselves with NO INPUT from anyone. One of my relatives has a Chevy that has reset itself back to zero miles on two different occasions. When she bought the car, it had low miles and was in excellent condition. After the odometer reset itself, she questioned if the car may have had more miles on it when she purchased it. We will probably never know for sure.

For what it's worth, I was driving the car when it reset the odometer the last time. No one seems to know why that odometer keeps resetting itself.