Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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I am willing to believe that if you shuffle a problem around enough you create a situation where nobody knows the truth and we’ve made it punishingly difficult to go get it.

It would be easy in a delivery business for an odometer to roll over one or even twice, and if you assign the new kid to get rid of the old trucks he might assume things.

That is not to absolve anyone. The truth can be a liability or an asset, and has to be managed not unlike inventory.

But that’s not what happened here:

> The lawsuit accuses FedEx of replacing the odometers in many of its vans with new ones that read zero miles, using the vans for a bit longer after that, and then selling them at auction with 100,000 miles or less on the new odometers.

That stretches credulity. But also, if you buy a FedEx truck or a police cruiser thinking you got a good deal on a low mileage vehicle, you’re a fucking idiot. Of course they’re going to drive them into the ground before selling them.

Right, but my point is that the truth is actually pretty easy in this case.

There's a federal law that requires you to either swear that you know the odometer reading is accurate, that the odometer has rolled over, or that the true odometer reading is unknown. This disclosure is made on every vehicle sale, and there's a standard form.

If you can't swear to the first two, you swear to the last one.

I wouldn't assume that a low mileage fleet vehicle is necessarily beat. Maybe it was assigned to a short route (There's a FedEx route on Lopez Island in Washington, half his day is spent on the ferry), maybe it is being phased out early due to a change to electric. There's a lot of reasons FedEx might sell a low mileage vehicle, and if you have a legal document from a major corporation stating that the mileage is accurate, most people would trust that.

This is incorrect. It's easy to find the actual statement required: https://eforms.com/images/2017/06/Federal-Odometer-Disclosur...

> I, ______________________ (SELLER’S NAME, PRINT) state that the odometer now reads ______________________ miles (NO TENTHS) and to the best of my knowledge that it reflects the actual mileage of the vehicle described below, unless one of the following statements is checked.

The seller is only strongly asserting what the odometer reads. If the seller doesn't know anything about that vehicle, then "to the best of [their] knowledge", that reflects the actual mileage.

Also to clarify, none of this is sworn, or "under penalty of perjury"

Places like CarFax collect data from maintenance done on the vehicle. In which case you may be able to detect mileage rollback because the number goes negative between two visits.

But a private vehicle fleet may use private mechanics, who probably do not report information like that (there's no financial incentive to do so, and there's probably no mechanism to make it easy).

I might be able to tell that this Dodge Dart has had the frame straightened twice and the engine doesn't match the VIN number. But a private fleet vehicle is probably a black box.

I don’t think I misrepresented that. You have to include the “following statements” that the form mentions, which are exactly what I caveated.

If you are a representative of a company that has written records indicating that an odometer was replaced (there is no possible way that fedex doesn’t keep maintenance records), I would argue that “the best of your knowledge” means accessing all those records and ascertaining that the odometer reading is true.

It’s not penalty of perjury, it’s penalty of federal law. Lying there is breaking a federal law specifically written to prevent this sort of odometer fraud.

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