Wait, isn’t tinkering with odometers like super fucking illegal in europe?
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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It's supposed to be in the US also.
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."
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/
How the hell is this not illegal in Germany?! They love to over regulate everything
It is illegal in Germeny, if the purpose is to falsify it, and legal to correct a wrong record: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvg/__22b.html
The trick is to correct it to a wrong record!
I would hope so. I would not be surprised that this is a US special…
One of the drivers mentioned in this article has a youtube video showing his odometer going from 124,999 to 125,001, completely skipping 125,000. One of the comments asks him to reach out to the law firm handling the class action lawsuit, but the owner replies with:
Happy to help if you're interested in paying a consultation fee for my time-- but otherwise these actions only enrich the law firms and I'm not volunteering to do that.
This mindset is so frustrating. Class action lawsuits are legit, they hold companies accountable and they pay out cash to people. To say that they only enrich law firms is not just wrong, but I think actually harmful to repeat like he has, especially in the great age of enshittification where everything tries to force binding arbitration agreements into every contract and agreement.
Possibly comes from experience with the shitty ones. I was involved in one for a now-defunct tech school I went to and all I got out of it was like $100. I didn't have to put any time into it but that certainly didn't make me whole.
I'd be a lot of money that the excuse is just a lie he thinks make him sound like the good person he knows he is not.
I mean, the guy is not wrong. Class actions lawsuits have notoriously low payout while law firms pocket millions.
However, it's a tool to hold companies somewhat accountable.
The guy should join a class action lawsuit so that Tesla stop their fuckery, but it is understandable that he doesn't want to spend time on that considering the shitty payout.
Another side is that you're also bound to their agreement. If the law firm was too soft on them, tough luck.
In an ideal world, we'd have government agencies prosecuting illegal stuff (and putting huge fines back into the economy) instead of hoping that private law firms will do a class action, but oh well.
Well if the law firm pay 20 cents check after making millions, what's the point.
The point is that the company being sued has to pay those millions in the first place. The law firm does pay itself rather well for that work, but I'd consider class actions to be one of the more defensible legal actions.
I got like $50 from an Apple settlement a month or two ago
In 2012? 2013? Not sure exactly when, but i got two 4 packs of red bull because it does in fact, not, give you wings.
Amazing the Tesla dev team that made this was dumb enough to actually put it in the UI in real-time. Just updates the mileage behind the scenes in data, then only update the UI slowly along the way. Not actually double counting in the UI visibly fast lmaoo
You think the dev team made the decision about this?
Also if I'm the dev on this project and I've been told to do this, this is exactly how to implement it. Malicious compliance baybeee
What in the actual hell is a "Predictive" odometer?
"Whenever you want to scam people as a company, just invent some fancy words that sound like innovation" odometer
It predict when the Tesla is going to fauk and void the guarantee ?
I admit I didn’t watch the video — I’ve trained YouTube’s algorithm well at this point and don’t want Tesla content — but what the fuck is a predictive odometer? The tires roll a certain distance. We’ve had odometers for like 75 years.
You can remove YouTube videos from your watch history, so they don’t influence your algorithm.
The article mentions that Tesla is kind of justifying the behavior by saying it is based on energy consumption and some other bullshit. The expectation according to SAE, which I find very interesting, is to be in a range of +/- 4% and for GPS enabled odometers+/- 2.5%, Tesla is missing the mark for at least 36%.
So we traded a proven, reliable, physical laws based method (wheel roll) in favor of unreliable electronics. Nice.
Electronics can be extremely reliable, but Tesla chose to be sleezebags.
It's not really that reliable as it it will depend on the diameter of the wheels that can vary with pressure, wear, and and actual tyre size.
A better method may be a sensor like the one used in optical mice.
...but what are we actually trying to measure here? The miles travelled, or the wear and tear that's caused by the wheels spinning?
Mileage by counting the number of rotation of the wheel.
The mileage is a measurement to give an idea of the wear, combined with other information to give a holistic view of the state of the car.
Fair, and thinking about it it doesn't account for unnecessary wheelspin
You've summed up every aspect of the Tesla. Especially now that real car companies are taking EVs seriously.
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A product that has a warranty which depends on any "predictive" metric is probably a scam, tbh.
Their insurance is (was?) kind of like that as well if you get the saftey score one. While some things are more general and concrete like following distance, time of day driving, they have one for forward collision warnings.
I'm not sure how much time you've spent in a Tesla, but that system is notorious for going off incorrectly. It's specifically really bad with parked cars on the side of the road on turns. So you're driving along a city street with cars parked on the side and it goes off and now your insurance premiums are more expensive.
I don't think you could find a single Tesla owner who hasn't had multiple false warnings, and consistently in certain circumstances.
So someone of course starts a lawsuit and Tesla initially defends itself, but just last week or something like that, it's no longer part of the safety score
influencer
We need to call them what they are; shills.
Yeah I used to think that all these Tesla fan channels on YouTube and Instagram were because the brand was seen as somehow special and exciting, like Apple used to be under Steve Jobs. But now I've come to the conclusion that most of them are being paid under the table and not declaring it, because their collective reactions to the past year or more of insanity just don't pass the sniff test.
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