Odometer reading recorded in kilometers at last MOT: how plausible?

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Stocho

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Hi,

Still looking for facelift E320CDI Black Facelift saloon, fully loaded.

Came across a car with last MOT being a year ago with mileage recorded at 160k, a year before it was just 80k.

Seller claims that the car was taken to Europe and last MOT was recorded in miles and in fact it was 100k (in miles) and current mileage is 120k. Last MOT station was actually North London.

How plausible is such explanation? Is it even possible? I thought that you can not easily change odometer from miles to km and such a change, even if possible, would require tools similar to the tools required for mileage "correction" - am I wrong on this? It does seem strange that the car could gain 80k just in one year. What is surprising that their are now advisories at all in MOT history of the car - based on that would look like a superb car extremely well maintained (never seen MOT history with no advisories).
 
No idea how a E'er works, but on my BMW E60 you can change the units to show in Miles or KM.

Does the E'er have a cluster which displays both MPH and KM or just numbers and you can amend the UNIT choice ?

Seems near impossible to rack up so many miles in such a short period of time
 
80K miles in a year? Doubtful but far from impossible. Sounds very plausible that the reading was taken in Km's.
 
80K miles in a year? Doubtful but far from impossible. Sounds very plausible that the reading was taken in Km's.

Is it easy to change odometer to km? (As I would not imagine a UK MOT station would read it in miles and than convert to km before recording it in MOT database).
 
mot station will just put down whatever the reading is.
I once bought a 44k mile crewcab tipper, priced as such, with an fsh, it was i think 5 years old at the time.
Luckily for me I bought it up north and drove down, when I got home my 310mile journey registered very incorrectly on the odometer that I had pressed as I left, showing almost 500 covered.
In the settings was a km/miles setting. Changed it back and I had actually procured a 28000 mile truck. had been incorrectly set from pdi so entire service and mot history was based on km covered not actual miles.
Quite a result!!
 
Not sure about a MOT but such mistake happened when my car went to VW for service. I used to use km instead of miles and forgot to change it to miles before service. They recorded 64K instead of 40K and buyer had to sort it out later.
 
Sounds very plausible that the reading was taken in Km's.
I agree. The odometer can be switched at will between miles and kilometres, so it's completely plausible.

FWIW, I only noticed when I had my bike MOT'd a couple of weeks ago that the incorrect mileage had been recorded at last year's MOT: the thousands of miles digit had been recorded as a 9 instead of a 6. This was fairly obvious to me because I rode to, and around, Corsica and Sardinia in the period between the two MOT's and I know that those islands are definitely more than 115miles away (the difference between last year's and this year's recorded odometer readings) :rolleyes:
 

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