So I bought a pretty new Certified Pre-owned 2004 Acura RSX last year when it had about 23,000 miles on it, clean Carfax , etc. A few weeks ago I pay it off and I receive the Title in the mail with an "actual" odometer reading of 52,756 which is clearly wrong (maybe someone hit a 5 instead of a 3?), it currently has 36,896 miles on it.

Has anyone ever had this happen? Where would they get this "actual" mileage reading from since the car has been in my possession and they have no idea how much I've driven it? They said I need to have dealership certify the real odometer reading, which I'm going to do, I'm just worried I'll get screwed and this will get flagged as an "odometer fraud" case in Carfax reports if I ever try to sell this in the future.

[Edited on September 20, 2006 at 11:18 AM. Reason : .]

9/20/2006 11:06:44 AM

^ If the 52K shows up on the carfax then they change it to whatever the real mileage is, carfax really probably will pick it up. Carfax is a piece of shit service and they always screw ppl on stuff like this. A friend of mine had a truck he bought brand new that he hardly even drove and somehow the carfax showed it had been totalled at some random mileage because somebody put in that wreck for the wrong VIN. Now since something was registered for that mileage and his next inspection came up with a lower mileage, the carfax showed he had a truck with an inaccurate odometer and that had been wrecked... Both of which were wrong. We called carfax and tried to do their "buy back guarantee" bullshit and they wouldn't have anything to do with it and refused to change any of the records no matter what we did... Pretty shitty.

9/20/2006 4:46:30 PM

Great that was what I was afraid of.

Actually I'm starting to wonder if I should just leave it as is and not worry. I don't plan on trading it in and the difference would be a lot less noticable down the road (ie when it's 5 years from now and it has 100,000 miles on it, is someone really going to notice that missing 15000 miles?).

9/20/2006 4:52:03 PM

Some of your maintenance and inspections will show up with mileage on the Carfax and that will trigger the odometer fraud warning.

9/20/2006 5:01:23 PM

So where does the actual mileage come from? Because jumping from 23000 to over 52000 miles in 11 months (over 29000 miles) can't be an estimate, it must be a typo right?

So there is really no way to avoid it? I haven't taken it in for any maintenance or inspections that would trigger an inconsistency yet, but I'm going to be moving back to NC in November so I will have to get my car re-titled and the mileage is going to be lower.

9/21/2006 9:22:05 AM

sue carfax

9/21/2006 12:22:55 PM

Carfax didn't fuck up. If they don't report everything that they find in the vehicle's history they lose their integrity and their reports have no value.

If anything, I'd just follow the correct procedures and get the title corrected. That should show up in the Carfax report and it's easy for you to explain to a potential buyer.

If you're planning to drive the car to 100k+ miles it probably won't matter anyway because buyers in that market are more concerned with condition and mechanicals than having a perfect carfax report.

[Edited on September 21, 2006 at 1:07 PM. Reason : l]

9/21/2006 12:53:43 PM

Anyway, I got an answer from Carfax. They said if I fill out this form http://www.carfax.com/pdf/cri-0305.pdf include a copy of both titles and "a letter on letterhead from the state DMV that issued the title explaining the nature of the error" they will fix it on their reports.

9/28/2006 4:02:05 PM