Unfortunately, odometer fraud still occurs regularly. In the Netherlands it is being pushed further and further, but a little further on in Europe it still appears to occur on a very large scale.
This is evident from data from Carly, a popular provider of a car diagnostics app. With the help of that app, users can access various data from the diagnostic system in the car. It can also be checked whether the indicated mileage corresponds with the actual number of kilometers driven. The team behind Carly recently anonymously analyzed 1 million data records for the entire year 2020 to find out how people drive in Europe. One of the things that was examined is the mileage. This shows that large-scale fraud occurs relatively far from the Netherlands.
Anyone who thinks, for example, that the odometer readings of used cars from Poland or the Czech Republic are manipulated very often, is wrong. Counter fraud in those countries is about the same as in the Netherlands and Germany, where between 5 and 10 percent of the counters has been tampered with. Fraud is huge in Bulgaria. There, 42 percent of the odometers have been manipulated. A percentage that is only surpassed by Malta, where 44 percent of all used cars have a significantly higher mileage than indicated.
Speed ​​riders
In addition, Carly looked at how fast the cars for which the app is used are being driven. One of the surprising results is, for example, that Danes, Austrians and Dutch drive faster on average than Germans, while in Germany there is no speed limit in many places. The Netherlands is even one of the six European countries with the highest average speed. However, this may also largely be due to the fact that we have a relatively solid high highway density and therefore you do not have to travel long distances on B-roads.
