Winding back electronic odometers?

"Ron Calls on his years of experience....and freezes at the controls" (internerdstuff) 02/18/2015 at 06:36 • Filed to: None

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I know old style Odo's were rewound by low lifes.Is this also a thing with electronic versions?Is it a known hack?Anyone heard about it?

The reason i ask is because i was looking at buying a car today. It had 65K miles on the click but looked far more used than that.For the record i passed on it

Twingo Tamer - About to descend into project car hell. > Ron Calls on his years of experience....and freezes at the controls 02/18/2015 at 06:47

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I've seen something that says it can be done by plugging a laptop into the ECU.

KnowsAboutCars > Ron Calls on his years of experience....and freezes at the controls 02/18/2015 at 06:57

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Yes it can be done. I've read it's even easier to do with electronic odometers.

Tekamul > Ron Calls on his years of experience....and freezes at the controls 02/18/2015 at 07:00

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You can do it more easily than with a mechanical unit on most cars. You just need the correct (illegal) tool plugged into the OBDII port. These tools are described as odometer "correction" tools, but they are used to alter mileage.
Unfortunately, that's why things like CarFax are becoming more important. A record of reported mileage readings helps sniff out egregious changes.

Cé hé sin > Ron Calls on his years of experience....and freezes at the controls 02/18/2015 at 07:21

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It's very easy. See here: http://bligidy.com/

Note that they call it "correction". God forbid that anyone would use their tools for clocking purposes.

Cé hé sin > Twingo Tamer - About to descend into project car hell. 02/18/2015 at 07:22

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Yes, just Google "mileage correction".

Not clocking of course. Oh no.

kanadanmajava1 > Ron Calls on his years of experience....and freezes at the controls 02/18/2015 at 07:41

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One of my coworkers bought a BMW from Germany. Its (electronic) odometer was showing quite low numbers but our professional grade OBD tester that we hooked up revealed that the odometer had been messed with. There was another reading that that showed higher mileage and it seems to be a value that cannot be reset.

If you can access good OBD tester you could try find if it has similar hidden mileage readings.

KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs > Ron Calls on his years of experience....and freezes at the controls 02/18/2015 at 07:49

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Oh it's possible. And common. The difficulty depends on the design.

Early 90s Ford cluster? Easy, as the mileage is only stored in one location. You just need a programmer.

Late model German cars? Harder. This is because the mileage is stored in multiple places and they all have to agree otherwise you get a tamper indicator. Some examples have a location which uses EEPROM, so the only way to reprogram it would be to either zap it and start again (would normally have other tamper resistant seals) or replace it completely (Very limited availability to anyone outside the dealer network, if at all, and likely incredibly expensive). BMW used their light switches for this purpose for a while.

thebigbossyboss > Cé hé sin 02/18/2015 at 09:00

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Sometimes there are legitmate reasons to correct. For example I drive a car with a broken speedometer and fuel gauge, so I need a new cluster and would have to correct it, if I wanted it to display the correct mileage.

Cé hé sin > thebigbossyboss 02/18/2015 at 09:04

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Yes, sometimes. But the legitimate instances are far outweighed by clocking.