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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 90804, member: 2178"] In Britain last year, 9.7 percent of Nissan Qashqais checked by one vehicle history service showed signs of the mileage being wound back. Volvo's XC60 and XC90 were not far behind, at 8.4 and 7.2 percent. Those are the models people here buy second-hand, shipped in by the container load. Whatever lands in Harare was inspected, taxed, and traded somewhere else first. That paperwork does not evaporate at the port. Most buyers simply never ask for it. So the question is not whether the number on the dash can be trusted. It is which country the car came from, because that decides what you can actually verify. [HEADING=2]Britain keeps a mileage log you can search[/HEADING] The United Kingdom runs a public test history record, and you need nothing more than the number plate to search it. It returns every test, whether the car passed or failed, and the mileage recorded when it was tested. Cars, vans and motorcycles are covered from 2005 onward. For English, Scottish and Welsh tests, you can also see the failure items and the minor problems flagged along the way. It amounts to a service history assembled by strangers. The eleven-digit number from the logbook is only needed if you want the test location. For the reading itself, the plate is enough. Two patterns give the game away. A reading that drops between one test and the next is the obvious one. The quieter signal is a car that covers 18,000 kilometers a year for six years. Then it slows to 4,000 a year, right before it is sold. Get that plate before the car is registered locally. Ask the seller for the logbook, or for a photograph of the old plate on the vehicle. Once it wears Zimbabwean plates and the paperwork has been mislaid, the trail goes cold in a way that is nobody's fault and impossible to fix. [HEADING=2]Japan writes the mileage on four different documents[/HEADING] Japanese stock arrives with more evidence than any other origin, which most buyers waste. The auction sheet carries the reading at the point of sale. The vehicle inspection certificate, the export certificate, and the maintenance notebook each carry their own. Cross-check them against each other before you look at anything mechanical. Four documents agreeing is worth more than a clean dashboard. Japan also keeps an odometer management system that stores every recorded reading from previous auctions, searchable against the chassis number. It exists precisely because winding back a reading was once easy money there too. The auction sheet itself flags trouble in shorthand. A dollar sign means the odometer was legitimately replaced and documented. A hash mark means the inspector could not verify the true mileage. An asterisk means a replacement is suspected with no records to back it up. Then there are the stickers. Oil change labels in the engine bay carry a reading and a date. A timing belt sticker usually goes on around the hundred thousand kilometer mark. Those are fiddly to fake, because the forger has to remember they exist. Worth knowing what a pre-export odometer check does and does not do. It cross-references the auction sheet and whatever service history exists to flag inconsistencies. It does not independently prove the reading is real. [HEADING=2]A locally registered car leaves no mileage trail[/HEADING] Transfer a vehicle here and nobody writes down the odometer. The process requires the vehicle for verification, along with the vehicle registration book. It also wants a CVR 4B form stamped by the Vehicle Theft Squad or the registry, used within fourteen days. Add identity documents and proof of residence for both parties. Add an agreement of sale carrying names, addresses, engine and chassis numbers, and the sale price. Read that list again. The state captures who sold it, who bought it, and what they paid. The distance the car has traveled is the one fact nobody is required to record. Which makes [B]checking a car's true mileage before you pay[/B] an exercise in archaeology once a vehicle has changed hands locally two or three times. There is no register to fall back on, and no test that logs a reading every year. What survives is whatever the owners kept. Service invoices with the reading written on them. The original import file, including the pre-export documents from the year the car first landed. A stamped booklet from a franchise dealer. Ask for the import file by name. A seller who has it will produce it in minutes. A seller who bought the car with no history at all has just told you something useful. [/QUOTE]

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