Hello all. I just recently looked at a 99 LS400 for sale near me. One of the things I found in the VIN report was an astronomical mileage discrepancy; a nearly 300k mile jump reported over the course of about 90 days some years back. The car is currently reporting what I believe to be it's actual mileage, and I did find evidence that the cluster has been removed at some point (bottom panel was loose and the cluster itself is missing a couple of fastening screws).
While I don't believe this car actually did 300k miles in 3 months, my question is; is the odometer reading on these stored anywhere outside of the gauge cluster? I'm curious to see if the real mileage can be read by an OBD2 reader or a Techstream.
In addition, has anyone heard of these clusters just erroneously reporting incorrect mileage?

 

ODO inconsistency + VIN report showing mileage jump... there's a story there somewhere. Yes it's possible someone replased the cluster due to it being defective and you got what you got.

I'm not really clear what happened though.

1) which direction did it jump? +300k miles? minus?

2) How many other reported miles did the car have previously, and what were their sources. Was there a very long gap where there were no mileage reports for a decade or more and this is just "catching up"?

3) What miles are being reported now

4) I'm not sure if the computer stores the odo where OBD can read it. I don't recall ever having seen it while poking around mine. I think it's stored in the dash itself. But I could be wrong.

 

Yeah it was an increase; went from around 80k miles in one report to around 380k in the next mileage report 3 months later. There actually aren't any gaps in the report; it's been getting inspected/registered every year. Most of the mileage sources are from those state inspections, but there are reports from various service shops corroborating and incrementing the mileage, before and after the jump. Right now, the cluster reads about 82k miles, but I think it's actually somewhere around 88k; before and after the jump, the PO was putting on about 2-3k miles each year.
I don't think there's any actual foul play here; this car's in fantastic condition. I'm more curious if there are any known issues with the digital odometers (like there seems to be with the ECU capacitors), lest this happens again.

 

Where did the report come from? Carfax or?

Since the odometer shows MORE mileage than the VIN report, I don't think any kind of deceit or fraud is going on.

In general, odometer readings are stored either in the cluster or ECU. IIRC, the LS400 stores the odo reading in the cluster.

I think the OP is correct in assuming the cluster was swapped at some point. I also believe that by law, this has to be documented someplace (???)

Federal Law: Federal statute 49 U.S. Code § 32703

 

Carfax report, yes. The last entry in the report is from a tire shop that reported the mileage at 82k some days ago. However, this entry was flagged as a mileage discrepancy as the reported mileage before that was at around 383k.

 

Did you obtain the Carfax report on your own or did the seller provide it?

Since you're just "looking" at the car and haven't purchased yet, have you asked the seller for additional info about the nature of the discrepancy?

 

I ran the report myself and brought it up while I was looking; the seller was not aware and was very surprised. I don't want to deluge too much here, but he did give me some history which is backed up by the VIN report, but he cannot get insight into the discrepancy due to the original owner/operators having passed.

 

Well if the seller actually has a car which has 300k fewer miles on it than he thought it did - if he's any kind of shrewd negotiator the price for the car just went up by $5000...