Odometer Tampering (1)

Sometimes customers ask us about the possibility of a car’s odometer being tampered with. It is an important question you want to make sure before purchasing if you are buying a used car. When you go to a used car dealer, along with the price, equipment, selling points written on the front windscreens, all the cars in the display have stickers saying “you can buy this car safely because its odometer had been checked using the odometer reading administration system”. Did you know about this “odometer reading administration system”?

From the view of a healthy future development of the used car market and consumer protection, the Japanese National Auction Association (NAK-Nihon Auction Kyogikai), an independent agency introduced the centralized system to eliminate any odometer tampering on used cars listed at auction by keeping a record of odometers of all the cars brought into auctions nationwide. This system is not only for all the cars at auction, but also for dealers, car sales companies and used car exporters like us. We can ring up and ask them if the car we want to buy has an odometer tampered with or not beforehand.

Simply speaking, all cars which are going for auction have to go through the recording system and at the point of listing, the listing date, its vehicle identification number and odometer reading should be recorded. For example, if a Skyline listed at USS Tokyo years ago had an odometer reading of 80,000Km and 2 years later the same car was listed in a different auction place with an odometer reading of 70,000Km, the data does not match, so it obviously means the odometer was tampered with; the car will be dealt as an “odometer tampered car”.

Cars at dealers which have been through the checking system have had their odometer reading checked at the auction place if they are bought at auction, so they are inevitably “checked with the odometer reading administration system”. Even when the cars are bought privately, the dealers can contact NAK to get their data checked through the system.

However, this is not a perfect system. You can definitely check cars which have gone through auctions but what if buying a car which has never listed at auction? If the only owner of a Mercedes Benz decides to sell it when the odometer reads 100,000Km and changed it to 50,000Km, the system cannot catch him out. When a car is listed for the first time at auction, with no record at NAK, no one can detect the tampering. Isn’t there anything we can do with the cars like this? To be continued…


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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
Kato building 4F, 1-1-2 Furuishiba, Koto-ku, Tokyo
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
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