Car dealers warn against hands-off odometer checks

Car dealers are being warned by an industry organisation to be on guard for imported vehicles which have not had their odometers removed and physically checked.

That could eventually apply to almost a quarter of the 100,000 or sosecondhand vehicles imported each year from Japan.

The Motor Trade Association has urged its members to "consider the risks" of selling cars which have had odometers certified by companies operating outside a new industry code of practice.

"If the odometer reading is subsequently found to be false, the dealer may face claims of misrepresentation," it says in a circular.

The circular refers to one company, Automobile Inspection Services, as not having joined the new code of practice.

The company says it has certified odometers for between 1500 and 2000 New Zealand-bound cars a month since June.

It says its procedures, which rely heavily on Japanese records and require odometers to be removed from vehicles for inspection only if there is reason to suspect they have been wound back, are better than the new industry standard.

Its representative in New Zealand, Nigel Grindall of Vehicle Remarketing Ltd, said removing and replacing an odometer risked damaging a car, and he believed the company was being hit "below the belt".

Although it was a newcomer to New Zealand, it was the industry leader for odometer certification in Japan, where it was owned by Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Subaru, and tested more than a million cars a year.

"We are experts at doing this, and we don't have to take out the odometer," Mr Grindall said.

Odometers had to be taken out and checked in only about 5 per cent of cars.

But Motor Vehicle Association spokesman Andy Cuming, whose organisation facilitated the new code of practice, said the association was not convinced about the effectiveness of relying heavily on Japanese paperwork.

He said yesterday that signatories to the code had told the association they had found evidence of tampering in odometers which had cleared paperwork-only checks.

Mr Cuming said his organisation supported the new code as a way of giving car dealers and their customers an assurance that a certificate showing an odometer reading on a secondhand vehicle meant something.