Which part(s)?
And who’s going to do it and bear the possible complications? If the woman hires someone, will the lienholder accept the results? If the lienholder hires someone, would the woman accept the results?
I can’t see the insurance guys hiring someone.
The odometer. Any electronic hobbyist could do it. I have no idea if any investigation or attempt to restore/display the mileage at this point could be used in a litigation. Too many people had the opportunity to mess with it. The person that is capable of making this thing work again could also change the mileage stored. It’s as easy as connecting up a 9v battery, one cable to ground and one tap to another contact and the number increases by one. You tap 90,530 times and this thing shows zero. If you want to do it in a few seconds, simply connect a $7 Mini Microcontroller and program it do do it for you.
Why not look at service records for the car, see what the mileage at the last service record and see if the current mileage seems reasonable.
If the body control module and the instrument cluster were still functioning properly the odometer would display when the door is opened, the ignition does not need to be on. Since there was damage to electrical systems in the vehicle it is uncertain what was being displayed in the cluster. There are other things displayed, when in a hurry a different display could be mistaken for the odometer.
The car was totaled last year. It’s probably long gone by now. It’s acedemic.
Another thought about the odo value- considering the importance of that number being correct, I’d expect it would be qualified with a checksum value stored in the device as well. The possibility of an electrical event changing both values so they match is, well, pigs should be flying by any minute now…
I’ll tell ya last few times we have driven (car related) to food fests, pig’s wings are great, next time you drive (car related) to a food fest check them out!!!
Are you saying to hook up the non-volatile memory to a new display and get a reading from it?
My comment was about checking the possibly damaged display.
You work for an insurance company. Why would you even ask a question like this on an anonymous forum that will only give opinions that will not have any effect on a claim.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I was referring to the complete display with the assumption that there is nothing wrong with it. Taking only the memory and attempting to read it with another identical display would take significantly more work and specialized tools simply due to the tiny size of the memory chip.
A lightning strike packs quite a wallop. Here’s what I found on a google search
"An average bolt of lightning, striking from cloud to ground, contains roughly one billion (1,000,000,000) joules of energy.
If it took one second to dissipate that amount of energy, by my back of the envelope calculations that would be over 15 million watt burst of energy. Not quite the 1.8 Giga-watts necessary to power up the professor’s Delorean time machine car, but it’s more than enough to fry or at very much confuse any of the electronics in a car.
Yes, a bolt of lightening could absolutely cause all of the bits of negative/positive charges that comprise “memory” or “data” in a computer… any computer, including the one that holds the subject’s mileage data, to be changed around, altering the data.
The problem is the lienholder’s insistence on charging the lessee for the mileage allegedly displayed on the odometer during the few seconds it “came back up”. This simply illustrates yet another danger of leasing. Any data corruption could cause a lessee to be subject to absorbent and insane charges.
Personally, I think the OP has a legal problem rather than a technical one. I recommend calling a lawyer.
It may have hust changed the display from Miles to kilometers.
There seems to be something fishy in my opinion. A reputably insurance company would never provide such a statement to their customer unless they can expertly support a positive response. They surely do not get this on this forum.
Nevertheless, it’s an interesting topic to discuss. I think we should involve MythBusters for help.
I think Oldtimer has a good point. It might have just switched to metric. But this whole thing doesn’t make sense. You don’t pay out on total loss for a leased car and then they get mileage too. And an insurance company doesn’t provide statements on storm damage. They might have made the mistake of recording the mileage incorrectly on their paperwork or something. Who knows? But I agree this is going to be settled in court.
For those with questions about the OP and details of the situation, maybe this thing was obfuscated intentionally.
Consider:
The OP works for the insurance company and was responsible for getting the mileage as part of determining the value of the car for payout. The mileage obtained is higher than the woman says, and the OP is wondering whether the electronics could have been scrambled.
The is no actual lienholder involved other than maybe if the payout is too low, the woman might get little to nothing, or have to pay the lienholder because too much is owed on the car.
So the dispute is between the insurance company and the woman, and the insurance company could probably pay for some forensic electronic recovery, but would the woman accept it?
If this is a lease vehicle I believe the lease company would be dissatisfied with the high mileage-value deduction. For example a 2015 Chrysler 200 with 90,000 miles would have a $3,000 reduced value.
If the lease contract only allows for 30,000 miles during the lease the customer is responsible for the additional loss, probably in a per mile charge.
The time to react to this would have been 10 months ago when the vehicle was in the storage yard, the customer must have been giving some documentation about the inspection and loss. It wouldn’t have taken much effort for a technician to connect a scan tool and read the mileage from the various modules.
I decided to revive this thread from a couple of weeks ago in order to report a personal incident that supports exactly what mountainbike stated above. A few days ago, we had a brief electrical “brown-out” in my neighborhood. After the electric power returned to normal, I thought that everything in the house was functioning properly, but about an hour later, I began to think…Why does it seems so hot in here?
So, I took a look at the HVAC’s electronic thermostat, and found that it was now “set” at 85 degrees!
Before the brownout, the thermostat had been set to “hold” the house temperature at 73 degrees, but the variation in voltage during that brownout clearly caused the thermostat to change its setting.
If this could happen with an electronic thermostat, I imagine that it could also happen with electronic dashboard instruments.
I think it depends on if your electronic thermostat receives its power from the HVAC system or the battery. The ones I have require an additional wire to power from the HVAC system so you don’t have to change batteries all the time. So if the power went out it could de-power the thermostat and go back to pre-sets.
Mine is connected to the home’s power supply, via a step-down transformer, and it also has a backup battery. However, I think that it only defaults to battery power if the main power supply is totally cut. In the event of a brownout, it doesn’t appear that it goes into battery mode. Or, at least that is my theory.
The batteries functions are to save the programmed setting and nothing more or less. The 24V or 12V coming from the transformer, usually mounted next to the HVAC, provides the voltage for the HVAC relays to turn on or of specific functions, i.e. heat, fan, a/c. There is no electric connection between the display and setting and the red voltage wire coming from the transformer.
Edit: in other words, a power outage does not affect the display and the programmed settings. If the battery dies the display setting and program are lost. A capacitor provides temporary power to the display and memory while you change the batteries. If you are slow and it takes too long the settings will be lost.