Wait, isn’t tinkering with odometers like super fucking illegal in europe?
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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It's supposed to be in the US also.
It's trivially easy to discover odometer tampering in the USA, and the law is actually enforced.
Carfax, for instance, will automatically flag if any data point has the odometer lower its mileage. Each time a car is brought in for service or sold, the mileage is recorded. If any of the datapoints do not advance logically, the car is flagged and all sorts of liability questions arise.
If Carfax can purchase the data, I'm certain that insurers do, too. Insurance is legally mandatory, and the corporations don't want to cover the cost of insuring a car with a cooked odometer (and unknown true mileage).
That only catches the end user tempering with the odometer to lower it. It doesn't do anything to catch the manufacturer artificially advancing it.
Not in Germany. Here in France we know to never buy a used German car : the odometer would certainly have been tinkered with.
This is misleading, it is illegal in Germany, if it is about changing the odometer to a wrong record, and only legal to correct it, if it was broken or is replaced.
Yes you're right. However it seems that around 30% of the used cars sold from Germany are concerned. A law that is not enforced is a fake law.
What do you mean with "not enforced"? Do you mean that people that find manipulated odometers with proof go to court and then nothing is done?
I get that it is sometimes difficult to proof a manipulation of the odometer, and that fraud here is pretty wildly spread, and maybe more prevalent in Germany compared to France, but that doesn't mean that other countries are not doing it.
I would also agree that anyone should prefer buying from local sellers first, but just saying that this is a special issue that only Germany has to deal, because they do not care about the law and order is wrong.
This is the same logic that some people on the right have: "Crimes happen more often in cities, and the reason for that is that they do not care about the law there."
Is the odometer not recorded when having yearly inspections? Or do people cheat it before those as well?
They are recorded in multiple different events (repairs at a professional service, oil change, inspections, etc.), but as a buyer you would have to become active, ask for and check the papers, contact past owners, inspect the car, etc.
Because changing the odometer is easy and cheap, and can raise the price at an average of 3000€ per car, it is done rather often and not discovered in many cases.
While there are laws against it, the implementation of more manipulation resistant odometers by the car vendors is still not there yet broadly.
Source: https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/auto-kaufen-verkaufen/gebrauchtwagenkauf/tacho-manipulation/
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I would hope so. I would not be surprised that this is a US special…
One of the drivers mentioned in this article has a youtube video showing his odometer going from 124,999 to 125,001, completely skipping 125,000. One of the comments asks him to reach out to the law firm handling the class action lawsuit, but the owner replies with:
Happy to help if you're interested in paying a consultation fee for my time-- but otherwise these actions only enrich the law firms and I'm not volunteering to do that.
This mindset is so frustrating. Class action lawsuits are legit, they hold companies accountable and they pay out cash to people. To say that they only enrich law firms is not just wrong, but I think actually harmful to repeat like he has, especially in the great age of enshittification where everything tries to force binding arbitration agreements into every contract and agreement.
Possibly comes from experience with the shitty ones. I was involved in one for a now-defunct tech school I went to and all I got out of it was like $100. I didn't have to put any time into it but that certainly didn't make me whole.
I'd be a lot of money that the excuse is just a lie he thinks make him sound like the good person he knows he is not.
I mean, the guy is not wrong. Class actions lawsuits have notoriously low payout while law firms pocket millions.
However, it's a tool to hold companies somewhat accountable.
The guy should join a class action lawsuit so that Tesla stop their fuckery, but it is understandable that he doesn't want to spend time on that considering the shitty payout.
Another side is that you're also bound to their agreement. If the law firm was too soft on them, tough luck.
In an ideal world, we'd have government agencies prosecuting illegal stuff (and putting huge fines back into the economy) instead of hoping that private law firms will do a class action, but oh well.
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Amazing the Tesla dev team that made this was dumb enough to actually put it in the UI in real-time. Just updates the mileage behind the scenes in data, then only update the UI slowly along the way. Not actually double counting in the UI visibly fast lmaoo
You think the dev team made the decision about this?
Also if I'm the dev on this project and I've been told to do this, this is exactly how to implement it. Malicious compliance baybeee
What in the actual hell is a "Predictive" odometer?
It predicts that Tesla could save money by padding the numbers, and does a little fraud automagically
"Whenever you want to scam people as a company, just invent some fancy words that sound like innovation" odometer
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