Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for mechanics and DIY enthusiast owners of cars, trucks, and motorcycles. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In my country, people believe that some vehicle sellers reset the mileage of vehicles to a lower number when selling the vehicles.
I want to know whether it is actually possible to do this in modern vehicles, and if it is possible, whether there is a way to identify that the mileage has been reset.
Also, is it possible to identify whether any engine trouble codes that were previously there has been reset? Does the ECU keep track of trouble code resets?
Yes, many ways, one being replace the dash cluster.
For the codes, once they are cleared then they are gone... I have chatted with garages and one with dealer level readers and once cleared...
Yes it is possible. I commonly offer services for mileage correction on old and new model cars. There are some tools designed just for this and can be done via OBDII port other need to be calculated and modified manually in the eeprom memory containing the mileage data.
Most of us who do this type of work are honest and are correcting mileage to match actual mileage after the part has been replaced. In many cases we may be even rolling the miles UP but as always there are those who are not so honest and do things they should not. I see this quite often in some of the specialist forums I hang around in.
Sometimes you can use a good scan tool to check other modules like PCM for mileage and compare but not always. Unfortunately there is no one way to confirm but your best bet is to check for maintenance records and use good judgement.
