There are (at least) three aspects:

1) rolling back an odometer;

2) trying to sell a car with a fraudulent odometer value;

3) when asked, claiming that the reading is accurate.

I would expect #3 always was illegal anywhere in the EU. #2 may have been a gray area in some countries or even legal; #1 may have been legal in quite a few (similarly, printing fake money was, and maybe still is, legal in the Netherlands, too. Printing it with the intent to spend it as real was a crime), if alone because many mechanical odometers would roll back when the car drove backwards.

The EU likely wrote a directive that instructed EU members to harmonize laws across the EU, that, once implemented, filled a few holes in international law. For example, if laws aren't harmonized, one could do the rolling back in country C, where #1 was legal and #2 was illegal, and sell the car in country D, where #1 was illegal, but #2 was legal, and neither country C or country D could prevent the car from being ex/imported because of free trade within the EU.

I think the EU also has worked towards making such fraud harder by requiring the odometer reading to be recorded whenever cars get up for mandatory checks (which are yearly for older cars), and require those readings to be brought forward when a car is moved between countries (otherwise, country D would not have any way to detect that rolled back odometer)

Weirdly I find that it's not illegal in the UK. The illegal thing is not disclosing it when you sell the car on (straightforward fraud).

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/88547/ca...

That sounds ok to me. It's your car, you should be able to set the odometer to whatever you want. Using that ability to defraud people of their money is what should be illegal.

That's how it is in the U.S. (at least in California). When you sell a car you have to write down the odometer reading on the paperwork and indicate whether or not it is accurate to the best of your knowledge. But actually changing the reading is not illegal. It makes sense: the reading could be off due to mechanical failure.

Makes sense.

I drive a Jeep, and the speedometer on it is off by 12% due to the larger-than-stock tires that are on it. The odometer reads 160k, but I would assume that it was 170-180k on it in reality, depending on when the tires were originally installed.

Unless you've simply decided this isn't important to you, changing the speedometer gear on a Jeep to an appropriate size for your tires is generally a several minute job with minimal tools.

On the other hand, what one really should be caring about is not the mileage per se, but how many cycles are on the drive train. The distance the chassis has moved doesn't really matter.

But each cycle represents more wear with the larger tires, since the drivetrain torque is higher. You can't cheat physics.

It's probably not a linear relationship though.

Correct—but having a functioning speedometer is generally useful.

Also, older vehicles have shorter odometers that roll over back to zero automatically.

I believe my insurance company took the odometer reading into account when calculating the rate for next year, so I wouldn't even have to sell the car to turn clocking into fraud.

The UK is (for now) part of the EU. If we believe the original article that it's illegal in the EU, then it's illegal in the UK (this is likely to be the case even after Brexit, judging by what is being said about the legal process). That doesn't always mean that action is taken, unfortunately. I also don't immediately find any EU laws about it (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getAllAnswers.do?referen... suggests that there wasn't any in 2011 and the new road-worthiness harmonisation only made it easier to detect)

Apparently the law's going to be changed in 2018.

Good job we'll finally be able to throw off the shackles of EU laws and have fraudsters sell us hooky cars. [Is this right?]

I think it might be more that it's a specific criminal offence now. But it was always regular 'fraud' beforehand if you said a car had done X miles but had done Y, just like lying about anything you're selling.

Good point, it would certainly be considered "unfair business practice" and I am assuming most developed countries have those sorts of laws on the books.

I think the car manufacturers made it a lot more difficult, just by adding an extra 0. This is predating digital displays, of course.

It's also interesting to reflect that getting a car to 100,000 miles used to be considered a sufficient outlier that it wasn't worth spending a few more cents to design odometers that handled that case.

it was probably just not on the books.