We went digging to see if that widely shared class-action lawsuit accusing Tesla of odometer fraud had any real-world backing. Honestly, we expected it to be overblown. Odometer lawsuits aren’t exactly everyday news, the last one I can remember was a branding disaster for Ferrari. To our surprise, Tesla drivers have been publicly posting about […]
A Tesla influencer randomly caught his odometer double-counting mileage on video. Wild.
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).
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…?
Tesla is probably the most closely watched auto manufacturer on earth. And it’s mostly fans! So like, friendly faces doing hypermileage content or commenting to other friendly fans about their fuel savings…
The video I linked is literally a Tesla fan being like "oh wait, it skipped a mile, what the fuck, did it always do that?"
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…?
That’s what fucks me up here! XD
Tesla is probably the most closely watched auto manufacturer on earth. And it’s mostly fans! So like, friendly faces doing hypermileage content or commenting to other friendly fans about their fuel savings…
The video I linked is literally a Tesla fan being like "oh wait, it skipped a mile, what the fuck, did it always do that?"