Rolling back the odo

Is there any way to tell if an odometer has been tampered with?

I am looking for another car to add to the fleet and am suspicious when I come across cars with unusually low mileage readings for their age.

In the good old days, with mechanical odo's. one could often tell by interior wear, rust and paint fading if the odo reading was accurate.

These days, cars seem to hold up so well, its really tough to tell if a car has 100k or 200k on it. I have also heard that todays electronic odos are actually easy to roll back if one has the equipment.

Finally, in my local classifieds, I have come across ads like this one:

Odometer repair $100.00 14-Feb-07
We can program all makes and models. Prices start at only $100 thats half of our competitors. Please contact me at 905 510-xxxx for more info

Therefore, obviously, its easy for the average seller to access such services, so it makes anyone's odometer readings more of a 'suggestion' rather than an accurate indication of use.

Any thoughts?

I imagine these days, they'd simply swap in an odometer from a wrecked vehicle.

Computers sometimes log maintenance intervals, stickers in the engine bay for oil and cam belt changes are other good indicators.

Check the rest of the car over, see if it matchs whats on the Odo.

I once test drove a 10 year old car, that had quite low K's.
But, it also had new seat covers, new steering wheel cover, and new pedals.
There were also some new switches on the dash.
This was a bit of a give away, why put new bits in a lot millage car?
Further inspection of the switches showed that the ones not easily replaced were badly worn, 100,000kms+ worth of wear.
Further inspection showed wear in the suspension bushes and engine mounts.
The car had clearly been rolled back.

Here in NZ, with the majority of our fleet being used imports, there are a variety of services that check odo's.

You will find that the same people who can "repair" them, can also check if they have been wound back.
They won't care, as long as you pay the bill.

try running a carfax report or something similar on the vehicle. I found that usually when a vehicle switches owners or is re-registered the odometer reading is recorded. You should be able to follow the readings in a somewhat chronological order. If the mileage has exceeded the mechanical limits of the odometer (older 5 digit odometers) sometimes you will see mileage alot less than what was previously recorded.

For instance a few months ago I was going to buy my father a pickup truck, the dealership was selling it as 106,000 miles. The odometer read 6,000 miles. However after I ran a carfax I found that the truck was registerd 4 years earlier at 99,000 miles. It was a work truck with a plow and all the goodies so I found it very unlikely that it had only had 7,000 miles put on it in 4 years. I was forced to let it go due to a suspicion of it having 206,000 miles.

Thank you for the input, folks.

It seems its still old fashioned detective work to sort out the fraudsters.

I am looking at a black '99 Lincoln Town Car , (black) 62k km.

It is EXACTLY like about a zillion airport taxis that prowl the city, except it has the Touring package. Nothing says fraud like rolling back the odo on a 500k taxi.

I would love to see someone try and cover up the wear and tear a taxi receives.

There would be other problems to, here in NZ for example, there is enough extra stuff added, like the meter etc, that it wouldn't be to hard to spot it.