If you’re like most people, when you begin shopping for a used vehicle you’re looking for a good deal. A low mileage car or truck for a low price. What you don’t want though, is a low mileage vehicle at a reasonable price that in all actuality is a high mileage vehicle that has a false reading on the dashboard. So then just how do unscrupulous sellers manipulate the reading on the odometer? Actually it’s not that difficult to do and doesn’t involve rolling back the little wheels with the numbers on them.
So if you’re like most folks you’ll probably be surprised when you discover that changing the reading on a vehicle’s odometer is in fact a whole heck of a lot more easily to accomplish than that. For instance to begin with there’s now software available over the Internet that allows a person to “reset” a digital odometer. However, most of scrupulous sellers simply opt to buy an entire used dashboard speedometer from a wrecking yard.
You see, the truth is that there are no security measures on a vehicle to prevent odometer tampering, so once it’s done, if it is done properly, it can be difficult to detect. Particularly if the potential buyer doing the inspection really doesn’t know what they’re looking for. The fact is though, that there are indicators on every vehicle that give away clues as to how much it’s been driven and if you know what they are they can also give you a clue as to whether or not the odometer reading has been altered.
For instance there’s one big red flag that you can look for that doesn’t even require that you visit the vehicle. You can do it over the phone. That is a car or truck that’s showing an extremely unusually low number of miles or kilometers on the dashboard reading. Particularly in older vehicle. Now understand here that low miles on a used car or truck is a good thing, and desirable but this would be what would be classified as “extremely low” miles and it is a red flag warning.
So the next step beyond that is to climb inside of the car and truck, so you take a closer look at “certain key areas” that can hold giveaway clues to the vehicles actual number of miles. For instance take a close-up look at the driver’s side door armrest to see how much wear it shows. If it’s excessively worn than that would be a clue that the vehicle is also excessively worn. Other places to look for wear include the foot pedals, and steering wheel.
Then lastly you need to give the dashboard a close-up inspection and what you’ll be examining here is the screws, nuts, and bolts that hold it in place. Look very carefully to see if any are missing because that would be an indicator that the dashboard has been removed to replace the speedometer. Then another thing to check for here is scratches on the screws themselves that a tool would leave and scratches on the plastic around the screws.
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