I recently saw a video about a man who bought a vehicle on Facebook marketplace from a private seller. The vehicle showed 187,000 kilometers, but when he took the car to get it registered it actually had 454,000 kilometers on it. How can a mechanic tell what the actual mileage was?
make sure a vehicle has paperwork to backup the odometer.
Titles, state inspection history, service records etc.
Don't buy mystery cars.
If the vehicle has had good service history, then carfax might show any big jumps backward in mileage. The real mileage will be stored in one or more ecu/ modules depending on age and car mfg. But the right equipment and/or software to read it would be needed. There might be some scanners that could read it, but gonna be a high-level ones (very expensive). ie...bosch, snap-on
It's my understanding that the high price scan tools can read what the mileage truly is. Wish I had one that does that and more.
I have a high price scan tool (the Autel MS906BT) and, unfortunately, it doesn’t read the odometer - at least on my vehicle.
I wonder if Scotty’s $5,000 scantool can.
I haven't seen it either, and I have a dealer tool.
I should really dig deep one of these days. Maybe I just haven't found it.
I think a scanner can only read milage if stored in same module as the vin, model, make when using auto detect.
on mine, VIN is programmed into each module.
Model isn't required. The VIN already tells you that.