Car mileage and clocking

Over the last five years, CarVeto has seen a spike in cars undergoing mileage tampering, commonly known as car clocking. In fact, a huge 45% increase has been recognised with around 1 in 11 vehicles now have some mileage issue recorded against them.

We check mileage history via the MOT DVLA mileage check system for vehicles aged 3 years and over. If mileage was higher at an earlier time in vehicle life, we flag a discrepancy and produce a Warning check result.

Cars are clocked to increase resale value. It’s an age old practice for those people intent of deception and includes elaborate service history fabrications and other fake documents. So, a car with 100,000 mileage is worth a lot less than its counterpart with 50,000 miles.

The biggest issue to hand, though is vehicle safety. If a car has been clocked and you buy it without knowledge of actual distance travelled, you’ve no idea how worn the parts are. You also can’t account for cam belt replacements or when the car was last serviced. At least you can check MOT history, online. 

It’s said that car clocking is cost motorists near to 100 million every year.

No, it is illegal to sell a vehicle that has been clocked (go here for mileage check reports), without declaring it as ingenue miles. However, the practice of mileage altering is not unlawful.

There has an increase of almost 25% from 2018 to 2019 mileage discrepancies. In 2019, nearly 850,000 vehicles were traced as clocked, but it was a little over 600,000 the year before.

Beyond mileage, CarVeto picks up one in three-vehicles with some hidden history. Significant issues for the motorist to content with including outstanding finance, theft and write offs.