This is important to consider when buying a used car.
In some jurisdictions twisting a mileage can be considered a crime, but most countries in the world do not regulate this moment at the legislative level. So, twisted runs are a very common phenomenon, but somewhere more has taken root, and somewhere less, according to the Chronicle.info with reference to carVertical.
Statistics show that we usually spend from 3 up to 5 years driving one car. That's 2-3 resales in one decade. So how risky is it today to buy a used car?
Varies by country
The experts decided to kick off the new year by figuring out how mileage twist frequency varies from country to country. So, a study was conducted that looked at approximately 900,000 car histories created during 2021.
According to the data obtained, the Baltics as a whole have the worst performance. In first place is Latvia, where more than 24% of checked vehicles have signs of a fake odometer. Estonia and Lithuania are not far behind, taking 3rd and 4th places respectively.
However, the Baltic countries are a small market. When it comes to the sheer number of cars with twisted mileage, look farther east and south to countries like Romania (2nd) with almost 20% twisted mileage, as well as Russia and Ukraine.
Also noteworthy are Poland (12%) and Hungary (14%), as well as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, where approximately 10% of all vehicles have false mileage.
This problem is less common in Western European countries with a higher standard of living where people tend to buy newer cars.
What Mileage Curl Causes
The odometer curl problem is «silent», but expensive. According to the European Commission, mileage twisting hurts shoppers by around 9.6 billion euros a year.
Many used cars in Eastern Europe come from the German, French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian markets. About 30-50% of these cars that are sold across the border have fake mileage. And although the economic damage is hard to calculate, the mechanism is quite simple:
- When a person buys a car with twisted mileage, he overpays (by about 25%)
- In the end, the buyer pays more for repairs and maintenance.
- It's harder to sell your car in the future.
How to avoid cars with twisted mileage
Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that odometer correction will become less of a problem in 2022 and beyond. Such actions are notoriously difficult to punish, both because the perpetrators are hard to find and because in most countries it is not a crime.
To determine the actual mileage, when buying a used car, you should use the services of specialists for car selection. They have enough experience to distinguish cars with twisted mileage, and they can also determine the technical condition of the car with very high accuracy.