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Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

I hope the truck keeps a record of how much this was used. I wouldn't want to buy a used truck that nominally had 50,000 miles on it but also had another 5000 hours of generator duty on the engine without knowing about it.

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After I moved to Vietnam, I learned pretty quickly that the numbers on ODO's, even digital ones, can be modified to whatever you want, for a few bucks.

US has very strictly enforced laws against odometer tampering.

"Major defendants in large odometer fraud prosecutions have received prison terms of up to seven years under current Sentencing Guidelines which do not permit parole. Sentences in the 18 month to three year range are common." https://www.justice.gov/civil/case/federal-odometer-tamperin....

Things like Carfax discourage it as well. They have partnerships with oil change (and similar) services that record the mileage and date. Rolling back becomes obvious.

given the number of odometer eeprom hacking tools sold on Ebay, it must be fairly widespread

No one says it's not easy. Stealing mail is fairly easy too. Federal prison is not a fun place to be, though.

iirc you can still get the true mileage through an OBD connector right? Might not apply in Vietnam, but I think it might be the case in NA

nope, you can buy tools on ebay to set the mileage value in the EEPROM to whatever you want.

e.g.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/OBDSTAR-X-100-PROS-Auto-Programmer-...

In countries like the US your authorised dealer will be recording the mileage every service, so you can't really cheat it and a consumer can ask the dealer network to check the milage.

Except if you’re like me and do all DIY maintenance

Right but then you suffer when you come to re-sell because you can't prove the mileage.

I have never in my life heard "well that mileage wasn't recorded at the dealer so I don't believe it"

I don't think what you're saying is a real thing that happens.

Except you don't because tampering with the odometer isn't seen as being common in the US.

Nobody buying a F150 in the states is going to question the odo mileage unless it's obviously wrong.

What happens if you roll back the mileage before every checkup? It could seem like you've only gone 1000 miles between oil changes, every time.

You're also assuming people take their cars to a dealer or licensed oil replacement facility.

Sure, but US commerce operates at a higher trust level with several checks against trust violations, like CARFAX.

Even my 20 year old GMC has an engine hour meter if you toggle the odometer.

It's good to know this can be useful more than just figuring out your average speed in mph over the life of the vehicle.

that’s already standard on F150 trucks, even before a generator became available.

However for engine life what you want to know is hours under heavy load and perhaps total revolutions.

I thought that much of the wear on an engine is load related, and non-linear, such that hours idling at low revs is utterly different from high revs at high power.

The odo reading is useful as an indication of wear on the drivetrain and suspension etcetera.

Hours is useful on a tractor/truck/boat because the engine is normally under load for a majority of the hours.

That was my thought exactly! Other equipment like this generally doesn't track miles but hours. Need to know both in this instance.

All ford trucks since at least 2015 come standard with a Hour meter on the display, probably even in the generation before that

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