There are several ways to check your vehicle’s mileage, and I’m going to talk about 3 of them so that what happened to me doesn’t happen to you. In fact, we’re going to talk about checking your mileage with histovec, vcds or carvertical.

Indeed, after several years, I realized that the advertised mileage of my vehicle had been tampered with. The mileage had been lowered by about 180,000 kms. The technical inspection had not been carried out by the previous owner; the owner who preceded him was unscrupulous and it turned out that it was he who had turned up the odometer.

The 3 controls are as follows:

• Mileage check with histovec (you can also check your mileage with carvetical)
• control with VCDS
• Visual and mechanical wear control

1 Histovec a very useful government service

Histovec is a website that centralizes information on French vehicles. It is a free public service for owners and buyers of used vehicles, based on official data from the French Ministry of the Interior.

In just a few seconds, you can check a vehicle’s administrative status or track its mileage.

First step: choosing between owner and buyer

Step 2: Fill in the information according to your plate format

enter the following information: your surname, first name, plate number, formula number.

Step three: Features

Step 4: Technical inspection history

Step five: The mileage graph

2 VCDS: an indispensable software tool

The VCDS is available everywhere for sale on French soil as well as abroad, those available on aliexpress can be unusable from one day to the next (due to an update).
Some sites on French soil offer a complete service, such as GermanDiag.fr.
Other sites, such as Ankk-vagcom, list tutorials for adding options or checks.

Thanks to the VCDS, you can check the mileage present in the various vehicle calculators, or by the presence of the mileage in the auto scan reports where you find errors.

The video procedure for checking mileage

Here are the results I found on my car when the odometer read approximately 160,000 km

3 Visual and mechanical inspection

As my vehicle is clean and never breaks down, I didn’t suspect a thing, a garage even told me that it had its mileage, the underbody is very clean, no trace of rust…

the different indications :

• Rust on the underbody or under the vehicle.
• Steering wheel wear is an indicator (mine was pretty worn, but I didn’t pay much attention).
• Seat wear can be an indicator.
• Lack of maintenance logbook with mileage tracking on invoices

Be careful when buying a vehicle!

Take precautions! Check your mileage with histovec or carvertical

What precautions or checks do you take?

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