Speedometer manipulation: a tempting business | tagesschau.de

Tachometer manipulation on used cars is fraud, but relatively easy to carry out and difficult to prove. This mainly harms buyers and the used car industry.

With just a few clicks on the Internet, numerous devices can be found that promise an “automatic kilometer correction” for prices starting at 30 euros. Many of these small control units come from China, some also from other European countries. With the supplied cable, they can be plugged into the standard connector under the steering wheel, and the manipulation can begin.

Speedometer manipulation promises high profits

Markus Sippl, head of ADAC vehicle technology in Landsberg am Lech, has been complaining about this situation for years. “The estimated damage,” says Sippel, “is around six billion euros, since around every third car could be tampered with.” The really good devices, which can also be used to adjust the speedometer on the latest vehicles, sometimes cost around 4,000 euros. Even this investment is worthwhile, as some fraudsters manipulate it on a large scale; for example, when an entire leasing fleet is being “processed”.

Big sums of money can be made with just one vehicle. A four-year-old Golf VII with a mileage of 120,000 kilometers costs 10,350 euros. The lower the mileage, the more expensive the car becomes. A manipulation could, depending on the speedometer, bring in around 2,000 to 4,000 euros: If the car has driven 80,000 kilometers, you get 12,250 euros for it, but if the odometer reads 40,000 kilometers, the car is still worth 14,050 euros.

No incentive for the auto industry?

The start-up CarCert wants to fight this scam. There, car owners can get a certificate for 29.99 euros in which the mileage of the car can be read. So far it has worked so that CarCert queries the odometer readings from the regular TÜV inspections and compares them with the odometer reading. In this way, buyers and honest sellers are to be protected by giving them an objective basis for purchasing decisions, says Patrick Scharwenka, Managing Director of CarCert.

However, the ADAC expert Sippl is not completely convinced by this concept: “The problem with these certificates is that the mileage that is entered here is entered manually. They are definitely not correct. Or vehicles only come into use after the third year General inspection or in the workshop. So you have enough options to change the mileage before this recording. ”

One problem with CarCert is that they cannot get the car manufacturers’ data – not yet. One is in negotiations, so managing director Scharwenka. This also leads to one of the fundamental problems that the ADAC has been pointing out for years: “The auto industry obviously has no incentive to act on the subject of speedometer manipulation because they themselves do not suffer any damage here. Ultimately, the damage is caused by the used car buyer. And that is the dilemma we are faced with. ”

There is already simple protection against manipulation

There have been chips for years that are built into newer cars and cost only around one euro. They save the odometer reading so that odometer manipulation can be virtually ruled out. However, some of these chips are not activated and the data is not accessible to the car owner, complains the ADAC.

Neither the auto industry nor the specialist trade want to leave this criticism as it is. The automobile manufacturers would do a lot, says Joachim Kuhn, managing director of the Hessen motor vehicle trade. Dozens of computer chips are built into the new vehicles. The mileage is also recorded with every software update. Manipulation could therefore be avoided if these data were released, because they de facto belong to the vehicle owner.

As long as that doesn’t happen, you should think twice about where to buy your car. “That is why we”, says Kuhn, “always recommend buying from specialist dealers, because there the workshop can carry out a data comparison and determine whether the vehicle history matches the mileage.”

Another advantage of buying from specialist retailers: There is a one-year guarantee. The buyer would receive compensation if a speedometer manipulation were discovered. But the bottom line is that the issue will persist until the automaker develops a system that makes changes to the speedometer impossible. The keyword here is the “security gateway”. This should only allow people to connect devices to the car who have previously obtained permission from the manufacturer.