That's soooo many felonies, but Trump will just pardon them.
No wonder he was worried about going to prison if Kamala won.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Wait, isn’t tinkering with odometers like super fucking illegal in europe?
It's supposed to be in the US also.
It's trivially easy to discover odometer tampering in the USA, and the law is actually enforced.
Carfax, for instance, will automatically flag if any data point has the odometer lower its mileage. Each time a car is brought in for service or sold, the mileage is recorded. If any of the datapoints do not advance logically, the car is flagged and all sorts of liability questions arise.
If Carfax can purchase the data, I'm certain that insurers do, too. Insurance is legally mandatory, and the corporations don't want to cover the cost of insuring a car with a cooked odometer (and unknown true mileage).
That only catches the end user tempering with the odometer to lower it. It doesn't do anything to catch the manufacturer artificially advancing it.
Very accurate. Most anti-tamp protections watch for lowering. Because who in their right mind would increase the mileage, right? :)
No reasonable manufacturer would do that. A manufacturer would be caught if they did that and -- oh wait shit that's exactly what happened
None of the anti-tamper measurements that are based on odometer readings would catch this, it simply measures how many revolutions the wheels are doing, multiplies that with a set value depending on the wheel circumference, and increments the odometer value accordingly. For Teslas, that number is 742 revolutions per mile.
If the Tesla software would "accidentally" set itself to lets say 450 revolutions per mile, your odometer would simply start ticking up a mile for every 0.6 miles you actually travel.
The only way to catch that is to use a GPS to measure how far you've actually travelled and do a comparison. Good thing for Tesla, GPS is an extremely rare technology nobody has access to, and with EVs, nobody ever even notices such things as "range" and "distance traveled".
Oh, right. So uh, how exactly did they think they wouldn't get immediately caught..?
Not in Germany. Here in France we know to never buy a used German car : the odometer would certainly have been tinkered with.
This is misleading, it is illegal in Germany, if it is about changing the odometer to a wrong record, and only legal to correct it, if it was broken or is replaced.
Yes you're right. However it seems that around 30% of the used cars sold from Germany are concerned. A law that is not enforced is a fake law.
What do you mean with "not enforced"? Do you mean that people that find manipulated odometers with proof go to court and then nothing is done?
I get that it is sometimes difficult to proof a manipulation of the odometer, and that fraud here is pretty wildly spread, and maybe more prevalent in Germany compared to France, but that doesn't mean that other countries are not doing it.
I would also agree that anyone should prefer buying from local sellers first, but just saying that this is a special issue that only Germany has to deal, because they do not care about the law and order is wrong.
This is the same logic that some people on the right have: "Crimes happen more often in cities, and the reason for that is that they do not care about the law there."
When I lived in Germany I found that the people were far more self-policing than Americans. There just seemed to be a general attitude of, "we know we're not supposed to do that, so we don't."
Fully anecdotal, sure, and that was 15 years ago, but nonetheless it's hard for me to imagine "ze Germans" tampering with odometers to sell cars.
Is the odometer not recorded when having yearly inspections? Or do people cheat it before those as well?
They are recorded in multiple different events (repairs at a professional service, oil change, inspections, etc.), but as a buyer you would have to become active, ask for and check the papers, contact past owners, inspect the car, etc.
Because changing the odometer is easy and cheap, and can raise the price at an average of 3000€ per car, it is done rather often and not discovered in many cases.
While there are laws against it, the implementation of more manipulation resistant odometers by the car vendors is still not there yet broadly.
Source: https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/auto-kaufen-verkaufen/gebrauchtwagenkauf/tacho-manipulation/
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I would hope so. I would not be surprised that this is a US special…
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