If the car is rear wheel drive and you tow it on it’s rear wheels, will it add mileage? Is this a REALLY dumb question? Does front or rear wheel drive matter?
I realize I’m generalizing here, but as in most cases, I don’t care.
-Dave Barry
Actually, it’s a really good question.
You can’t take off miles in reverse. Can you put miles on in neutral? I’d betcha a penny you can’t. I’m gonna test it out for fun this evening…I will go roll my car down a hill in neutral and see if my odometer rolls too… now I have something to do after work.
She wasn’t sure what to do, so she looked at how the government did things and decided to run her life that way.
The odometer (almost) always reads the output shaft of the transmission (or transaxle for FWD). So, the odometer will advance whenever the vehicle is moved in a forward direction and the drive wheels are on the ground (regardless of whether it is running or not).
pmh is right. There is a cable from the transmission to the odometer/speedometer. If the drive wheels are turning forward, it’s registrered on the odometer.
Just to throw a hitch in this though. I have a '96 Cavalier and the speedometer part is electronic, (You turn the key off while the car is moving, the speedometer goes to zero), although the odometer part is still mechanical. In my Mom’s '99 Cavalier, the odometer is a digital display. Which would indicate that there isn’t a mechanical connection, but instead an electrical connection the transmission. In that case, the key would have to be on the register mileage on the odometer.
Like most things, the answer is,“it depends.” For most cars, if the driven wheels (the ones connected to the transmission) are rolling forward, you’ll add miles while towing. If you tow a car that way for more than a few miles, though, you should disconnect the driveshaft to prevent cooking the transmission. If you do that, no miles will be added. However, if you’re towing a really long distance, get the wheel bearings repacked to prevent cooking those. In olden times, (model T’s) you could jack up a car and run it in reverse to take miles off the clock. That doesn’t work anymore.
–Nott
I feel I must speak for the tens of millions of air-cooled VW owners in the world and say that in these, the most-produced cars ever, the odometer runs by a cable driven by the front driver’s side wheel. In this case, any time the wheel rolls, you add miles (and can subtract them in reverse).