OMG. I got goose bumps when I read the OP. This happened to me in the early 90’s in an '87 Celebrity. I had pulled on to a highway from a stop sign. I glanced down to check my speed and noticed the odometer was rotating at a fast rate. I looked up to the road and looked back down to see the odometer was counting backwards.:eek: I was on my way to my girlfriend’s house. I told her and her parents what I had just seen. Obviously nobody believed me. I repeated the same driving maneuver hundreds of times after that to no avail. Over the next years I occasionally told different people and always got looks of non-belief. I had stopped telling people about it because I began to believe that I had not seen what I did.
Thanks for the flashback OP. And thanks for the confirmation that I really did see my odometer going backwards. By the way, my Celebrity was blue and had a rusting chrome bumper (didn’t they all though). This was in southeast Ohio. Maybe we had the same car.
I turned in my leased '05 PT Cruiser with 35,999 on the odometer. By the time they drove it to the back of the lot and cleaned it up and got it into sellable condition, it probably got parked at the front of the lot with exactly 36,000 miles on it.
(It turned out that I didn’t have to turn it in until it had 36,038 on the odometer, presumably because it had 38 miles on it when I got the car).
I had this happen on a 1990 Buick Regal. The odometer showed a bit over 80,000 when I acquired it. It would operate properly less and less as time went on, eventually spending most of its time not turning at all, but occasionally it would move forward at near warp speed, adding a mile every 10-15 seconds for a few miles, and occasionally rolling backward for a mile or two at a fast but slightly slower rate. Most of the time this car was driven by the then-MrsBomb, but I saw it happen for myself as well.
On some car review site or other, I know I’ve read that some Buicks of that era were apparently known for having odometer issues.
