So, thinking about a subject that sometimes comes up on low mileage luxury cars: possible odometer setbacks.

Most buyers use a "reasonableness" test: does the mileage seem reasonable for the age of the car? And, of course, they order a carfax** and view the mileage accumulated over time. But when cars exit the dealer or mechanic carfax network, and the states no longer demand odometer inspections, Carfax stops accumulating mileage records. So, maybe the last two years have no entries with miles.

IMHO, on luxury cars, two items seem to drive the value of doing a setback: first, buyers expect highend cars to have low mileage because it's assumed that their wealthy or older owners, who can afford them and don't drive them all that much. Second, the value of a highend car drops fast as mileage increases, because buyers try to avoid the risk of high mechanic repair and maintenance costs. Even shaving off 5-10Kmiles (say, 42K to 38K) can add up to a nice bit of extra change for the unscrupulous.

So, a '12 Jag (or Maserati, Bentley, Porsche etc) that has, say, 60Kmiles can be set back to 40K (or 50K) for a big increase in sale value. Buyers may consider the 40K miles reasonable enough not to set off alarms. In the BMW world, it was a wry joke about the number of used cars that hit the market with 98K miles. I see a number of 9-12 year old XK's come by with less than 40K on them. Big step up in value from the 60K range.

And, of course, there are title washing states here in the US, where an adjusted title can be had for reasonable $$. That usually involves flooded or salvage vehicles, but could also involve odo adjustments.

So, a question: is it simple to setback an XK odo, and other than sometimes un-trustable carfax (or similar), is there any way to counter it?

Panthera


**And, there are carfax editors out there, so always get the carfax from carfax, not the one the dealer (or curb seller) hands you with a smile.

 

I believe the topics of rolling back odometers is prohibited here, if that’s what you mean. Modern cars and Jags have sophisticated matching systems (mileage recorded in multiple modules) to prevent such a thing. I do know Jaguar corporate have the ability to adjust it directly via main dealers but main dealers do not have direct access for such a routine.

But it’s d think the effort required for some unscrupulous reseller to do this far exceeds the value or interest. These aren’t valuable machines regardless of how low mileage is.

 

Thanks, no intention of asking specifically how it can be done, and agree that subject should be prohibited. More interested in if it has been done, in anyone's experience, and if so, how is it prevented or detected . My curiosity is whether the XK's are prohibitively difficult (or impossible) to setback. People thought the BMW's were impossible to do (the "tamper dot"), but it still seemed to happen, even with odo data written into several ECU's.

Main Dealers would have to be able to install a new instrument panel, and of course they would have to be able to reset the odo to match the old one. But setback systems are getting smarter every day, and the economic motivation seems meaningful. I guess my suspicion antennae jump when I read about a 10+ year old car with 25Kmiles or so.

 

A healthy dose of suspicion is always a good thing I supposed. There will always be cars that get bought and never driven, or Nanna only drives her kitty to church on Sundays. But to answer you question, I have no idea but im sure it can be done with the right tools and knowledge.

 

I encountered a car that had been rolled back, but its been well over 30 years ago. When I was a teenager I was enamored with the new mk2 Supras and would ride my bicycle down to the Toyota dealer to drool over them till the salesmen would shoo me away. Later after buying a 66 Rustang, I would still go down there and dream. There was no way as a teenager with a part time job I could afford a new Supra of course, but one of my father's coworkers had leased a Celica GT and had turned it in at the end of the lease. That would have been similar enough, but much, much cheaper and dad, having a Toyota truck that seemed bulletproof, kinda liked that car so he said let's go down and look at it. Well, dad knew it to have very high mileage at just over 60K miles (and was expecting it to be cheap), but when we got there it showed just 40K. Dad immediately told the salesman we weren't interested and I never learned whether that coworker rolled it back to avoid the mileage charges or if the leasing company did it after the fact or if the dealer did it. But ever since then, its always been a question in my mind when shopping used cars whether the mileage is accurate.

One thing I discovered when Jaguar shopping is that the first owner of a Jaguar is almost always a leasing company. There are economic penalties for lessees to keep the mileage down. I'm sure some unscrupulous and ingenious people can hack the modern computer systems, but I think you can still tell from some of the same clues we used to look for back when it was relatively easy to take the odometer apart. Look for excessive wear on the edges of the rubber brake pedal pad. Open the driver's door wide open, lift the end and check for play indicating excessive wear in the door hinges, i.e. lots of short trips. Look for pitting on the windshield (its really amazing the difference in clarity between 60K miles vs a new windshield - you just don't realize because it accumulates gradually). Does it have the original tires and how much have they worn? Visually inspect all the suspension bushings for wear (tho you may need a mechanic who knows what to look for). A pre-purchase inspection is often a good investment.

I bought my XF with less than half the expected mileage for its age, but in testing the navigation system function, I found the previous owner's home address was still in there and I checked in Google Streetview to see where this car had spent the first half of its life. The owner lived in a very neat little house with a garage less than two miles from downtown so I suspected he just had a very short commute, maybe even walked or bicycled or took the bus to work most days. I noticed that the advertisements almost always went up the moment the car was taken in trade, before the car went through dealer prep and I would try to get there ASAP. I turned one XF down because every nook and cranny was full of old, rotting leaves, indicating it had been parked outside under a tree its first five years which is like the worse thing you can do with a car. If you can get there before they send it through dealer prep, you can see evidence of how it was really treated by the previous owner. Were they fastidious or did they practically live in it, was it Felix or Oscar, and maybe even find Felix' address in the nav system. Of course the owner may have commuted to a factory 60 miles outside of town and just liked urban living, but you just have to sum up all the clues that you can find.

 

Easiest way to answer your question is to simply google the same topic using Ferrari as the subject vehicle. Caveat emptor!
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easy enough

just program as new module and take the code from the steering column

 

Need to dig further, but on some cars one or more ECU's have the mileage stored in addition to the odometer. The number of locations seems to vary from one car to another.

My old Carly utility had the ability to pull mileage from multiple units on my BMW, via a subroutine that billed itself as "check used cars".

No idea whether it's possible on the X150.

 

SDD has a feature for resetting the odometer. Legitimate reasons for using this feature include replacing a defective instrument panel.
So, it can be done. The question is: who would cheat the next owner by reducing milage or concealing damage?
I was surprised when a young lady attorney (almost a daughter-in-law) sought help to that end. A save-the-world, government can support us all type who also "avoided" income taxes!

 

Yes it does, but it can only be done remotely by JLR in the UK. Without SDD, JLR would have no other way of doing it. There's other routines in SDD which also require a remote in from JLR and not accessible to the main dealer.

 

Glad to hear it. If SDD was all it took, none of use could trust an odometer....

 

You can get coded access for SDD and rollback without being a dealer. It really isn't that hard, but no one bothers with it though in the USA because of the pressure of depreciation makes the gains not worth the penalty. Risk a felony so you can sell your car for $2000 more, if that? There are OBD devices that slow logging of mileage- but that's not what you're talking about and I'm not sure if those devices work on JLR

 

See odometer tampering thread from 2015: Odometer tampering - Jaguar Forums - Jaguar Enthusiasts Forum