A 1964 Super 88 with nearly 1/2 MILLION miles on it? I don't think so. Some of us never learned how to read an odometer.

 

I'd guess it's been around at least once from the interior, but . . .

 

Did you look at the photo of the odometer that he includes? It's the same digits. He just doesn't appear to know where to put the decimal point. It could be 48,082.2 miles. I could be 148,082.2 miles. But it's surely not 480,822 miles!

 

He might be used to his new car which may not have an odometer with the tenths digit on it.
My Caddy does not have it so that the same 6-digit display will display 100k's. You have to look at the trip odo if you want to get accurate.
I am guessing this was probably done to reduce costs and demand less processing power...

 

Maybe so, but this argument kind of falls apart as soon as you think about it for a few seconds.

First, even if he is so used to the newer odometers which don't show a tenths digit that he doesn't realize that this car HAS a tenths digit, if he stopped and thought about it for half a second, wouldn't he realize how unlikely it is that the car has nearly 1/2 million miles on it? I mean, before he writes that down on his eBay listing, shouldn't he stop and wonder whether that's correct or not?

Second, the tenths digit was always white. On modern cars without a tenths digit, the rightmost digit is not white. Again, if he was paying half attention to what he was doing, he might have noticed that this car's rightmost digit IS white and wondered why and then investigated and figured out what was going on.

As far as why modern cars don't have a tenths digit, I doubt it's a cost-saving measure as much as it is simply a redundancy that's been avoided. Think about it. How often do you really NEED to see your odometer turn at the tenths digit? Unless you're trying to measure the distance between your driveway and your neighbor's three driveways away, the only real purpose of the odometer is to record the total miles accumulated by the car, and you don't need the tenths digit for that because that level of precision is not necessary. But tenths digits have traditionally been included on odometers, and people expect to see them. But now, because even relatively low-end cars come with a trip odometer which DOES have a tenths digit, there is no reason to include one twice.

As an aside on this, I had a 2005 Ford Freestyle that had a tenths digit on the regular odometer. It was the low end SE model. On the Freestyle forums, those who had a higher end Freestyle with a different information display reported that their odometers had a tenths digit UNTIL the car reached 10,000 miles. Then the tenths digit went away. So the odometer would read 9999.9 just before the turnover and 10000 afterwards. No more tenths digit. The decimal point went away, and the rightmost digit because the ones digit. If you wanted to measure tenths of a mile, you needed to flip over to the trip odometer. On my Freestyle, the tenths digit remained after 10,000 miles.

 

Enough said - we do not know the individual listing it. Many people will not stop and think about anything. Sometimes people's stupidity baffles me - I see it so much more and more. Is it just in the dallas area?!

I have seen adults confused by digital watches that have the seconds displayed... They ask me what time it is and I show them my watch - they look and stare and say huh?? They fail to notice the seconds incrementing every second... They then ask someone else.
I know a lady who drove her car with the temp light on until it blew up because she did not think to stop and look it up in the manual. It was even making nasty sounds as a warning!

I have seen some ads that have the decimals for the price in the wrong spot but they do not even proof it. I saw a crap-car that should be worth 5K listed at 500k. Some do not even proof read things.

All is funny to hear about but quite sad in reality.
No normal person would list a car for sale with 480000 miles when it might only have 148000...

 

I agree. It's easy to overanalyze. But it just struck me as very funny that any car would be listed with nearly 500,000 miles on it as though that was as common as dirt.

 

it's just an example of the (lack of) education in this new millenium. I see errors all day on newspaper web pages, etc. some of it might be EASL issues, but my friend, the English college professor and I discuss this all the time.

 

I think it is just a typo. You see it all the time on internet adds. Fat fingers, not reviewing the add before submitting. Heck I do it myself and see it all the time on this site. Nobodys perfect. I don't understand the big discussion on this issue