Carproof - Odometer Discrepancy
 

I'm sure some of us have seen this at one or another. Reading a carproof (now carfax) report and seeing the odometer jump back in time.

My question is has anyone actually went ahead and bought a car where this happened? Were you able to determine if it was just incorrect data entry or an actual odometer rollback?

A friend showed me a report on a car he was interested in. Odometer (digital) showed 130,xxx KM in Sept 2013 and by Oct 2014, it reads 90,xxx KM. I thought maybe they entered it in miles but the math is off. He's only interested in it because it's 'low mileage'.

Should he just walk away?

Does it have any entries after that point? What does the odo in the car show currently?

Yes it has a lot of entries after that point for service records.

The car's current odometer is about 113k which is consistent with the report post-discrepancy but still way off from the 130K it peaked at back in 2013.

The 130K it peaked at is quite consistent with the service records throughout its life.

Can't really tell from the amount of information given. Are there more days and odo readings from before 2013?

Does the new carproof still link to icbc's database?

Yes

Here's a snippet of the report he sent me:

Looks like it was definitely rolled back or had the cluster swapped for some reason (is it a manual that may have been swapped from auto?). It's kinda odd that it isn't flagged for the discrepancy. Doing some rough math and assuming it was changed right before 09/09/2014 that odo would be at ~144k when it jumped back and should be at ~156k now?

edit: Try checking the free MyCarFax to see if it lists any details around all those services. It might have nothing or it might show more details.

Car's an auto. He looked through MyCarFax and couldn't find anything either. Funny thing is the car was overly maintained but no mention of a cluster change during that time period. Super weird.

Assuming the cluster was swapped, I always thought the new cluster would be calibrated to the car it's being mounted to? But yeah, no flagging is weird. That's a huge mileage decrease.

i once had a car that had impossible mileage because aircare messed up. went from 40k to 600k to 80k. it raised red flags on the carfax report.

That's how any normal person would do it, though with a digital odo it might be a dealer-only thing and some brands seem to toss all their specialty equipment after not that many years.

definitely cluster swap, it makes no sense.

Well that's too bad as the true mileage would be higher than what the odometer is saying. My friend is pretty sure the current owner has no awareness of any of this.

Also, should my friend buy it now and want to sell this it in the future, he might end up dealing with the same thing as this blemish will probably never be clarified.

Though now I also wonder if the new cluster would have a unique number on it that would prove it's not original to the car and thereby clear the owner of any potential illegalities like rolling an odometer back.

I've never sleuth'd so hard before :lol

That is super sketch, 50k rollback. Also looks like the car was only driven 5-7k a year, a weekend car?

I think it was. Or maybe a church on Sunday type car.

My friend is probably going to pass on the car but is thinking about forwarding the report on to the current owner who probably has no idea this happened.

I mean I would hope the owner does find proof of a swap (serial numbers or something). I would hate to have a 'tampered' odometer on my lap.