sszewczuk

Is there a way to tell if the odometer reading is ok? I have attached a pic. The numbers seem off to me, even though the report showed no odometer tamperings. The eight and 4 seem messed up and not aligned properly, but I cannot tell for sure?? HELP!

MDchanic

Lower your expectations.

GM was not so detail-oriented that they made sure all those little numbers lined up perfectly.

If you really want to know whether someone has tampered with your odometer, you can just take it apart and look inside (thereby tampering with it) to see whether it looks like it's been messed with.
At least when you put it back together, you'll KNOW that it's been messed with .

- Eric

jaunty75

If your 8 and 4 are bad, your 3 looks even worse!

Eric is right. Odometers have had not perfectly aligned numbers since forever. I've seen much worse than yours. Electronic odometers have finally done away with this problem, if it ever really was a problem.

oldspackrat

Yeah,
Now if you want your car to have lower miles, you have to swap out the whole dash board from a car with less miles, not just the speedo. I'm not even sure that would work though on some cars??? Of course I've never done anything like this to a car I've restored.

sszewczuk

more confused than ever now---- hmmmmm

jaunty75

About what?

Your odometer looks normal. If you're still concerned that it's been tampered with, you're going to have to look for other evidence than slightly misaligned numbers.

If this is the only evidence you have, then you don't have any evidence, and you're worrying over nothing.

MDchanic

What's to be confused about?

1. You'd still like the car, even if the mileage were higher, right? I mean, you're not going to drive it into the seller's living room if you find it's got 70,000, are you?

2. If someone DID turn back the clock, then it's worth more money, right? If you found it had been turned back, you wouldn't turn it forward to make it more authentic, would you?

I'm afraid I don't quite see the problem here.

- Eric

kartmaster

After a certain age, I don't trust (or worry) about an odometer reading anyway. My car has over 250k miles on it (7 digit odometer) and is in a lot better shape than most 120k mile Toronados still on the road today.

Unless you have an ultra low mileage car, who cares?

Rickman48

We've some guys in the Chi-town area, [now retired??], that would turn your odometer wherever you wanted, and you'd need a microscope to tell!
Big business in the 70's + 80's, before digital and computers, and everyone did it! 20 min. job!
Some big name dealers got caught, too.

Jaybird

The previous owner also could have easily swapped out one speedometer with another. Without a computer recording the mileage, who's to know?
BTW... My speedo numbers don't line up correctly either. I took one apart years ago. It's not too difficult to set the speedo to your desired mileage.

Some auto experts have suggested, you need to determine if the carpet, gas pedal, brake pedal, seats and other wear related parts match the overall wear of the car, to assist in determining if the mileage is correct, or at least in the ballpark. With that said, any car that has a odometer that only records five digits is suspect without documentation. The odometers on both of my vehicles read around 40,000 miles. I'm sure they have turned over once.

Jaybird

Lady72nRob71

The odo int he pic looks okay.

I found it easy to do also when i swapped in a rally pac into my 86 Olds (looks like the one in the picture). I set it to the mileage to that of the old one and everything lined up. I did not disturb the anti-tamper features in the process either.

This is a way to judge. Look at normal wear items and campare with vehicles you have or had with similar miles.

BlackGold

The best way to determine if the odometer is correct is to do a title search back as far as you can for the car. Laws may vary from state to state, but with each change of ownership the odometer reading is recorded and the seller is supposed to state whether that reading is known accurate, known inaccurate, or unknown. Even if one or more sellers lied, you may be able to piece it all together by looking at the sequence from seller to seller.

Allan R

What year is the car you are showing? From my perspective it could be up to 1988. There are some cars out there with plain low mileage. I understand about the numbers not lining up. That's a quirk of old GM cars. My 72 Cutlass will take a couple hundred miles to line up the 'thousand' digit after it turns to the next highest number. Other cars I've owned have clicked over the numbers exactly like what you seem to be expecting. As others have suggested, and is true, a lot of GM odometers are notorious for showing numbers the way you're seeing them. I'm not wild about it either, but I'm not going to spend a couple hundred $$$ on an odometer. If you can accept that it's good enough to read, you'll breath easier. Unfortunately there is no actual way to determine 100% that the speedo has not been tampered with.

My 1995 Regency Elite had a 'tamperproof' electronic cluster. Guess what? The PO tampered with it and removed about 30,000 miles. I found the descrepancy when I checked the vehicles sales records against GM repair history. When I bought the car, it showed 172,000 on the odometer. But it had been sold at auction 5 years earlier with 177,000 on it. Then again 3 years later with 'unreported mileage'. That was when the odometer fraud was found. The creep was caught and spent 2 years in the pokey for it.

Bottom line? The car still ran great for another 7 years until age/wear and tear made it a donor to the boneyard. Enjoy driving your car. If it really bothers you to look at the odometer put some tape over it and just use your trip meter, except that it's just as 'messed up' because these are linked through several connecting gear sets..

MDchanic

Except that a lot of states (and provinces?) didn't start doing that until the '70's or '80's. I know that in New York, only cars after '72 are titled, and there was no place to record mileage on any of the sales paperwork for pre-'73 cars at least through the '80's.

- Eric

snowballs442

[QUOTE=Allan R;320359]What year is the car you are showing? From my perspective it could be up to 1988.

It is not an 1988 -- speedometer did not go to 120
It is not an 1987 -- needle was different
It is a 86 442

My odometer is the same way. The numbers dont line up the way they used to.

Allan R

While I can't speak to the US component, I do know that this process of recording mileage is sketchy in many parts of Canada. There is no requirement in my province to record mileage - it's voluntary. Even the Vehicle Registries don't bother asking for mileage; sort of like they don't care and it's one more thing they would have to do in their overworked little offices....

Personally I think that vehicles should be inspected every year for roadworthiness and mileages recorded. I know - Dream on....

joe_padavano

For what it's worth, once the speedo is out, it is VERY easy to reset the odometer to whatever you want. I have reset every car I completely restored to 000000.0. And no, this is NOT tampering if you disclose it to any subsequent buyer. Every state has a place on the title to so indicate.