Odometer Tampering on Used Cars Is Rolling Higher These Days

• There are 1.9 million vehicles on the road today with incorrect numbers on their odometers, according to Carfax. That is up 7 percent from a year ago.
• While California has the most of these kinds of vehicles on the road today, the rate of increase was especially high in Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
• Digital odometers can make it easier to falsify a dashboard reading but also harder to get away with it if someone takes the time to investigate.

Used-car prices continue to decline in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean everything on the secondhand market is running perfectly. One unfortunate, old-fashioned trend that’s making a bit of a comeback is odometer fraud. The digital age has, in some instances, made it easier than ever to roll back time.

Almost 2 million vehicles on the road today have an odometer number that’s been reduced in some way, according to a new report from Carfax. The 1.9 million incorrect readings represent a 7 percent increase from last year, Carfax said. As the largest car market in the U.S., it’s not a surprise that California has the most affected vehicles—more than 437,000, Carfax said—but that number is only 2 percent higher than last year. There were three states in the top 10 with the most affected cars that saw double-digit growth in odometer fraud in the past 12 months: Texas (up 15 percent), Florida and Arizona (both up 12 percent). These rollbacks can have a real impact, causing buyers to lose an average of $4000 in value with their purchase, not counting any unexpected maintenance costs, Carfax said.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been tracking odometer fraud for decades. In 2002, it said there were around 450,000 cases of odometer fraud reported each year and that these misreported numbers ended up costing used-car buyers over a billion dollars a year. NHTSA said there is about a 3.5 percent chance that a car will have its odometer messed with in the first 11 years of its life.

As we wrote in 2018, the digitization of vehicle odometers introduces a host of other factors to an odometer rollback, as so many other parts of the car use that number. This, plus increased data capture by auto repair shops and other sources, mean that even if the odometer is messed with, there are now more ways to confirm any changes. In 2021, NHTSA changed its rules for required ongoing odometer reporting so that any vehicle built in or after the 2011 model year now needs to be tracked for 20 years instead of just 10, as it was before. NHTSA said it made this change because the average age of the car on the road was increasing, and a change in the rules was required “to address an increase in odometer fraud involving older vehicles.”

How to Protect Yourself

If you are looking to purchase an older vehicle with a mechanical odometer, there are some key things to look out for, NHTSA said. Ask for the title to see what the officially reported odometer reading is, and make sure that that detail is not difficult to read. If the car includes maintenance records, especially oil changes, they can be a good start to estimating accurate mileage. For relatively new vehicles (with under 20,000 miles), the tires should be original. NHTSA also recommends getting a vehicle history report, which Carfax (unsurprisingly) offers as an organization interested in selling information about used cars to buyers. The group’s Odometer Fraud Check compares your Vehicle Information Number (VIN) to information in state DMV databases of vehicles that have been reported as having their odometers falsely changed.

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