According to our friends in the north, specifically the Nordic region, car owners will be easier to cheat once advanced technology is introduced.
Bo Ericsson, CEO of the Swedish Vehicle Workshop Association (SFVF), is the one sounding the alarm. He is pretty cool that all the big players are doing the right things, but there is a group of companies out there which are doing their very best to verify and guarantee that what you are buying is the real thing, with a properly stamped-up service history and genuine mileage.
Apparently, consumers in the EU are being deceived by rogue car dealers for the equivalent of €8.9 billion a year, so it is a good job we are off then… What is being highlighted is mileage fraud. It’s not as exciting as the great British crime of ‘clocking’ but it’s pretty much the same: tampering with histories and digital readings and whatnot.
The SFVF also views the advent of self-driving vehicles with some dread because they will constantly be connected when 5G is introduced. It thinks that is a hack waiting to happen, allowing bad people to remotely manipulate odometers.
The SFVF makes a case for boring things like digital service books, but actually printouts of company car service histories have been around for decades. Surely, the simple answer is to ban all this tech or, to be on the safe side, do as we always recommend right here: buy a zero-technology vehicle, or ZTV.
As usual, let’s avoid the Defender or Series Land Rover cliché. Most of them are ZTVs, but you knew that. It is hard to find any contemporary carb-fed, no chip, no rail injection motor. There has been an element of elec-trickery since the 1970s. So let’s look at basic, reliable, boring vehicles that aren’t classic car trendy.
Hateful old-school diesels are great, such as an unburstable 2003 Peugeot 406 HDi Rapier estate with all the services documented from 4500 to 140k miles and the belt done at 100k. An ex-demonstrator car plus one owner, no history doubts and yours for £895. That should be an almost 50mpg piece of kit, too.
Another estate – this time a 2003 Volkswagen Passat TDI with a documented 240k miles and a couple of months’ MOT – was £250, so presumably bigger bills are around the corner. This was another two-owner example, incidentally.
What I like about these sorts of vehicles is that there is no attempt to hide the miles. These are not true ZTVs, just honest ones.
