2 million cars are on the road with odometers that have been tampered with or are malfunctioning

Of the 25.9 million vehicles that make up the Spanish car fleet, nearly two million show deficiencies in their mileage, according to the report produced jointly by Carfax, a vehicle history provider, in collaboration with Ganvam, the association that groups together motor vehicle dealers, based on the analysis of more than 100 million odometer readings from cars across Spain.

The data in the report come from a variety of sources. Among these data are those collected by ITV technicians during inspections carried out from 1993 to the present day. Thanks to them, it has been possible to conclude that most of the inconsistencies detected are directly due to oversights in mileage control, errors in recording the figures, malfunctioning and, of course, the traditional manipulation of the odometer to make the vehicle easier to sell, which are the main reasons why odometers fail to give an accurate reading of the real distance travelled by the affected vehicles.

Even so, and contrary to what one might think, not all inconsistencies are always the result of odometer tampering to make a vehicle easier to sell. Odometer manipulation accounts for 70 percent of the cases in which it occurs, and for that very reason it is a practice that is clearly in decline; fewer and fewer vehicles show significant alterations, and an increasing number of irregularities are due to other causes, mostly related to computer faults or oversights when recording the kilometres driven on repair sheets at workshops and even at the ITV stations themselves. These errors often stem from successive rounding in recording mileage, accumulated over the vehicle’s working life.

Likewise, the report also makes clear that the old belief that mileage irregularities are exclusive to passenger cars is not true. Of the two million vehicles with irregular mileage, 55.94 percent were passenger cars, 24.28 percent vans, 7.93 percent motorcycles and 7.37 percent trucks. Motorcycles are not exempt either, as 4.8 percent of the vehicles with odometer irregularities were two-wheelers.

What is strongly related, according to the Ganvam-Carfax study, is the age of the vehicles in which these irregularities have been found. 87 percent occur in vehicles over 10 years old, precisely those with the highest mileage and which have also undergone the greatest number of workshop or repair interventions. Moreover, it is highly telling that the group immediately preceding them, cars aged between 8 and 10 years, accounts for just 8.30 percent of mileage inconsistencies, while the rest of the fleet does not reach even five percent of cases.

And if we take into account that it is precisely the vehicles over 10 years old that pollute the most, are the least safe, are the worst maintained and have the greatest likelihood of their occupants dying in an accident, this once again highlights the need to establish a scrapping plan for these models that removes them from the fleet and helps to rejuvenate it.

“The report’s data show that, fortunately, odometer tampering and manipulation are a marginal practice. Nevertheless, we must work to eradicate it completely, promoting, among other things, responsible maintenance and the necessary changes to the Road Safety Law to classify odometer tampering as a crime,” says Lorenzo Vidal de la Peña, president of Ganvam.

According to Marco Arban, director of Carfax for Southwestern European countries, “many measures are being taken to reduce mileage fraud, although there is still much to be done. Our goal is to create greater transparency in the market and, thanks to cooperation with the DGT and other companies in the sector, we will manage to reduce fraud, just as we have already done in other countries.”