Milage on UK Jap Cars ?

Barr

Hi All

I was wondeing about Jap imports through the UK where they have to change the clocks too MPH to meet UK regulations.

For example if a Jap comes in with 50,000 Kilometers ,do they change it to 50,000 miles or do they work out the equivelant in miles and change it to the latter?

pablosd

they work it out to the equivalent and correct the mileage

trad

They do but they have to recalibrate the speedometer to read in miles per hour, if not it's an MOT failure.

There's a device called a SpeedM8 (speedmate) that converts the speedo signal from kilometers to miles so that the speedometer reads in mph. It also delimits jap imports from the 112 mph restriction they have. I have a few lying around somewhere that convert mph to km/h

niceirishfella

There should be a cert showing the conversion.

Max Headroom

pablosd wrote: »

they work it out to the equivalent and correct the mileage

And probably 10,000 less while theyre at it..;);)

stifz

I don't think i've ever come across a jap import with correct miles. Looked at a pajero as few months back with 37k on it.. Its was 97' and judging from the seat & interior wear there was absolutely no way the mileage was correct.. more like 237k.

My belief is... all jap cars are clocked before they arrive here.. But thats my opinion.

Max Headroom

stifz wrote: »

My belief is... all jap cars are clocked before they arrive here.. But thats my opinion.

ALL jap imports ARE clocked....its too easy.....if youre buying a jap import from a dealer they'll have the export documents with the actual milage when it was at auction..ask to see this...bet they wont show you...;)

cpoh1

Max Headroom wrote: »

ALL jap imports ARE clocked....its too easy.....if youre buying a jap import from a dealer they'll have the export documents with the actual milage when it was at auction..ask to see this...bet they wont show you...;)

I have my auction sheet for both my imports (one came through the uk first) and the mileage is spot on for both. Guess that makes your theory look very silly doesnt it?

Max Headroom

UUH..look at you with your two cars...:p....Are you a dealer..? did you import the cars yourself..?

cpoh1

Max Headroom wrote: »

UUH..look at you with your two cars...:p....Are you a dealer..? did you import the cars yourself..?

Not a dealer no. Picked up the skyline in the uk with the owner keeping all its paperwork and picked the honda up after spending 3 months in the country, it came with the photocopied auctionsheet too. I have a daily runaround and a less well behaved weekend car that gets taken out when its dry and im in the mood!

both cost less combined than an E46 M3 would have cost 12 months ago too

Wibbs

Max Headroom wrote: »

ALL jap imports ARE clocked....its too easy.....if youre buying a jap import from a dealer they'll have the export documents with the actual milage when it was at auction..ask to see this...bet they wont show you...;)

I wouldn't say all and I don't know about this moment in time but I can tell you 3 years ago the vast majority of jap imports in this country were clocked.

Almost none of the main dealers in them had auction reports. The usual answers when asked was "ah sure you can't read Japanese/we never get them/we throw them out. In one case I know for a fact where they did have one it was a (badly) faked one. It's condition was changed from 1 to 3 while they were at it. I know because I was looking at specific cars and I saw the same cars show up in Ireland a couple of months later and all but 1 had the mileage reduced. Sometimes to a silly degree(120+k to 35k). They're helped by the fact that the Japanese seem to be very variable with mileage travelled for a cars age when compared to Ireland. You could have a ten year old Japanese car with less than 20k on the clock and one of the same age with 120k.

I also saw two cars that were marked down as condition damaged(one quite severe front end damage) at the japanese auction, yet magically repaired themselves by the time they got to Ireland and ended up as condition 4(in their dreams).

If I was bringing one in and using a dealer to do it, I would insist on the auction report. I would go to a smaller dealer with a good rep too. As the market in them has declined I reckon many of the well dodgy types have gotten out of it nowadays.

Max Headroom

Excellent cpoh1..so you did things properly, a lot of guys i know imported their own cars..as with you its the only way to know the genuine milage....i would NEVER buy a jap import car from a dealer.....its actually quite easy to diy anyway...As Wibbs says with the current decline theres a whole heap of lads tryin to shift their rice-rockets...

Barr

I would very much doubt that all the Japs are clocked . Most of them going through the Japanese aution sites have low milage anyway.

Wibbs

Not always. Not even generally. IMHO that's a perception based on the fact that some are low mileage for the year when compared to Ireland. There are more low mileage cars for a particular age, but when I was looking through the auctions I was surprised enough at the mileages published. It's the same for condition.

Jap cars generally hold the miles well anyway. The Shaken(Japans NCT) almost guarantees it as it is very bloody tough. Even so condition 4 cars on models say 5/6 years old were not the norm. 3 or 2 was more likely. Interior condition was generally high though. Rare enough you would see a C. Mostly A or B. A clean interior can make a car look like it has a lot less mileage. In general I would say the average Irish driver would not be as fastidious with cleaning interior or exterior compared to the Japanese.

Buyer beware basically. I think if it was me looking for another one, I'd either go and bring it in myself like before(though VRT would be a much bigger issue now AFAIK), or buy one that's already been here a while and looked after. If it has an auction report that the owner kept even better. I even got log book maintenance pages with mine.

colm_mcm

Depending on the car, there are 2 ways to do it.
replace the dial face with a MPH dial, max speed will read 110mph.
odometer will still read in kilometers

fit a conversion chip to the speed sensor, max speed will read 180mph
odometer reading may or may not be changed, but any future mileage will go on the car a lot slower: i.e the chip makes the speedo think the car is going at 62% of its actual speed. this also fools the 180kmph limiter fitted to Japanese cars.

Senna

I'd say a huge amount of jap cars imported to Ireland are clocked, i've seen cars sitting on dealer forecourts with a timing belt sticker on the cover with more millage on it than on the dash and a friend bought one with a panel filter sticker stating 20k more than the dash.
But these are clocked by agents working for the Irish dealers, the japs themselves would never clock the cars.
I've bought two jap imports, both from the UK and both with the auction sheet and dealer book (much more common in the UK), the auction sheet is very easy to read, so knowledge of Japanese is not required to make full sense of them.
If there is any jap paperwork, its always a bonus, pages of it might not make sense and the dates are different to ours, but i wouldn't buy a jap import (unless just a cheap car) if it does not have an auction sheet. If the dealer say he doesn't have it, then there's a reason, so walk away.

Mycroft H

any jap import i've ever seen always has a km speedo not a mph one......

so why is there changin of the speedos to mph???

colm_mcm

for the UK market.

Barr

colm_mcm wrote: »

fit a conversion chip to the speed sensor, max speed will read 180mph odometer reading may or may not be changed

This is the part I am interested in, so the odometer may never have be changed to its Kilometre equivalent when it comes into the UK .

In theory its quite probable that Jap cars via the UK could have a lot less mileage than they presently read as it was not converted to miles before the chip.

I'm guessing there is no set rule what way it has to be done in the UK?

colm_mcm

no set rule, it depends on who does it.

The only way to determine mileage is with a full service history from import, and the auction sheet from Japan.

bladebrew

brilliant point! even looking at jap import civic type r`s theres a strange amount of them with around 50k miles on the clock,maybe im just being paranoid??

and its a really long boat journey from japan,plenty of time for someone to be working away on the cars,no-one is going to stop them in the middle of the ocean!!

who actually decides the grades on jap imports??,is it the auction house in japan?

Sids Not

The japs are a very honest people, you can be sure any fiddling with milage was done here or the UK.....;)
Doubt if there any jap imports out there with genuine milage ...

colm_mcm

More personal imports tend to have genuine mileage. My imported car tallies up with the mileage TBH.

Wibbs

bladebrew wrote: »

brilliant point! even looking at jap import civic type r`s theres a strange amount of them with around 50k miles on the clock,maybe im just being paranoid??

Nope 25 to 50K is the usual and unless I had all the details I'd walk away. Every car I knew to be clocked was within those figures. Some weird dodgy dealer meme goin on. I would say it's usually the end dealers too.

who actually decides the grades on jap imports??,is it the auction house in japan?

Yea the auction house in Japan. They're pretty accurate and thorough. They even measure the dents and grade them. Bigger or smaller than thumb size apparently.

mondeo

I have imported several cars from japan over the years and a majority of them I believe to have genuine mileage however their were two cars in particular that obviously had tampered clocks. But I did not complain because what does one do send the car back to japan? :rolleyes:

Barr

colm_mcm wrote: »

no set rule, it depends on who does it.

The only way to determine mileage is with a full service history from import, and the auction sheet from Japan.

Thanks Colm , you have answered the question spot on I think the matter of clocking is a seperate issue and is not just isolated to Jap cars.

Wibbs

Even if you import directly stuff can go missing. When mine arrived the wheels had been swapped and the gear knob had gone walkabout. Apparently it can happen at the docks at this end, never mind on the boat over.

Gary ITR

Wibbs wrote: »

Even if you import directly stuff can go missing. When mine arrived the wheels had been swapped and the gear knob had gone walkabout. Apparently it can happen at the docks at this end, never mind on the boat over.

Unfortunately the typeR's usually end up gear knobless

Sids Not

Onkle wrote: »

Unfortunately the typeR's usually end up gear knobless

and driven by knobs ...:p

Wibbs

Sids Not wrote: »

and driven by huge knobbed men ...:p

FYP.

Senna

Wibbs wrote: »

Even if you import directly stuff can go missing. When mine arrived the wheels had been swapped and the gear knob had gone walkabout. Apparently it can happen at the docks at this end, never mind on the boat over.

The brother was down at the docks once, looking through the fence at long lines of jap imports just off the boat. A fella approached him and asked was he looking for something in particular, the brother was, so the fella gave him a yellow high vis top and brought him in for a look, i'm nearly sure the brother said all the cars were unlocked, there was security there, but that might not mean a lot.

Again, i doubt anything is taken off the car in japan, more likely anything that happens, happens over here. The japs even throw any extra parts or aftermarket parts into the cars when they sell them on. Plenty of examples of cars arriving at the port with the boot full of coilovers, exhaust, second sets of alloys etc etc.

stifz

cpoh1 wrote: »

Not a dealer no. Picked up the skyline in the uk with the owner keeping all its paperwork and picked the honda up after spending 3 months in the country, it came with the photocopied auctionsheet too. I have a daily runaround and a less well behaved weekend car that gets taken out when its dry and im in the mood!

both cost less combined than an E46 M3 would have cost 12 months ago too

Photocopies of auction sheets could have been easily altered..

cpoh1

stifz wrote: »

Photocopies of auction sheets could have been easily altered..

Im sure the scrupulous are well capable of it! Its pretty easy to tell when something like this has been tampered with, either by the qulaity of the copy itself (mine is actually a scanned version), the person you are dealing with or most importantly the car itself. The DC5 was a grade 4, B interior and was in mint condition and are easy to spot from the grade 3 or A cars.

My dc5 was imported provately and was lucky with all its parts, was only missing the gearknob, all the defi gauges, tein damping controller and standard exhaust and airbaox were all still in the car when the first owner imported it himself.

Im told most of the gear is fleeced in barcelona where the ship stops on its way over here and polished off when its left standing in dublin port.

If I was importing myself I would be waiting when the ship docks and watching the clowns who drive them off the boat to make sure its been minded and then taken away asap on a flatbed truck.