But some are crying foul…
You might have seen the news reports from Florida citing a Carfax studying claiming the state is fourth in the nation for rolled back odometers. It’s enough to make anyone worry, especially with vehicle costs, gas prices, and inflation surging. And while news stations claim there are more than 75,000 vehicles on the roads in Florida with rolled-back odometers, none have linked to the Carfax study. We searched for it and found nothing. But wait, there’s more.
Police are looking for the rightful owner of a Chevy Impala here.
A man out of Glendale, Arizona was shocked to find that Carfax claimed the odometer on his personal truck was rolled back. Michael Silva started a pressure washing business and so got an older truck to get him around from job to job. However, as the business became profitable, Silva needed to get a newer pickup. That’s when he found out the Carfax report for his old truck claimed the actual mileage on it was far more than what was showing.
Just the fact Carfax suspected the odometer on the truck was rolled back had a negative effect on its value. Frustrated, Silva reached out to a local investigative journalist. It came down to the truck’s records getting mixed with another truck’s records in Virginia. Once Carfax was alerted to the mistake it corrected the report for Silva’s vehicle so he could sell it for a fair price instead of getting hosed. That situation makes us wonder how many more supposed rolled-back odometers Carfax has flagged are the result of a similar mistake? Carfax insists such incidents are rare.
Countless car shoppers trust Carfax to give them, well, the facts about used cars as they’re shopping the market. However, some claim the reports from the service often have errors. We’ve ran reports on our own vehicles in the past out of curiosity and the results were troubling with some critical info missing, some data completely wrong, and random info added out of nowhere. Maybe we were just in that batch of rare mistakes?
Sources: CBS 4 Florida, AZ Family
