A Current Affair outs more dealers winding back mileage

October 7, 2014

A Current Affair last night ran a story on Japanese imports with wound back mileage, a somewhat inevitable outcome given the proliferation of this practice by Australian used car dealers in the industry. You can view the video in the link below.
http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/article/8915786/the-big-speedo-windback-scam

I of course have plenty to say about this as someone in the industry, as someone who runs a business that does not tamper with mileage, and as someone who has fought for a long time to have this scurge wiped out. While I could write a short novel on this, here are the major points.

The BAD:

• This story failed to address the most important fact when talking about how dealers should investigate the mileage on their cars, and it's this: they don't have to. They get the paperwork in question ALWAYS, so they ALWAYS know if the mileage has been tampered with. Buyers have to pay to get this paperwork from a third party source themselves only because the dealers are hiding this paperwork from them in the first place... the dealers have always seen it (you can't export a car without it!) and this story failed to address that. Dealers one and only fall back argument is that they didn't know which is completely untrue, and everyone in the inustry knows it's always the dealers who request that the mileage is wound back, either in Japan or in Australia on arrival.
• As always, reports like these paint a bad picture of the industry as a whole, and so innocent dealers (there aren't many, but there are some) have their reputation damaged en masse as a result. This hits particularly close to home for us as we never wind back speedos (and have been quite vocal against this), yet I regularly have to deal with people who think ALL imported cars have wound back mileage, when in fact buying from an import consultant such as J-Spec is completely trust worthy.
• While All Imports / All People Movers used to be one of the bad ones (and some of the people involved with them are still in the industry) there are a couple of other dealers who are even worse who were very lucky not to be the subject of that report. It paints the picture as though the business in question is an unusual case, while in reality the problem is so widespread that if you buy an import from an Australian used car dealer the odds are far better than not that you'll be buying a car with wound back k's.

The GOOD:

• Public awareness of scumbag dealers can only increase as a result of this, though this is a very double edged sword as indicated in my second point above.
• While I'm a bit skeptical given that fact that government departments such as DOTARS really couldn't care less if people are winding back speedos illegally, this may be a a further gentle push to get some department to enforce that mileage is checked prior to export to stamp these practices out. So many other countries do it and it's ridiculously easy to implement, but there is no interest in doing it here by DOTARS or anyone else...

As a final reminder in regards to all of this, all cars imported with J-Spec ALWAYS come with the ORIGINAL Export Certificate which can be used to determine the real mileage of a car so you can import with confidence, and are subject to THE J-SPEC MILEAGE PROMISE