A lot of ads for used cars will say things like “has 60k original miles on it”. What exactly does this mean and are there ever any unoriginal miles?
I take it to mean “on original engine and transmission.”
sometimes it means the seller is the original owner.
I think it’s often thrown in as a meaningless modifier - kind of a Humpty-Dumpty word meaning anything from original owner, original powertrain, not rolled over on the odometer, generally not fudged in any way, to… nothing much.
“Original miles” means miles since new.
The alternative would be “miles since restoration”, where a new speedometer was installed and original miles are unknown.
This.
It is a bit meaningless, but it makes it clear you didn’t mean one of the others that you’ll often see in such ads, like “30,000 miles since restoration” or “only 10k miles on rebuilt engine”.
I should note that often they will list miles since restoration even if the original mileage IS known.
I have at least once seen an ad that had to deal with a really complicated permutation:
When the car had, say, 89,000 miles on it, the original engine was replaced with one that had 60,000 miles on it. Since then the car has gone 25,000 miles. So the car has 114,000 miles on it, the engine has 85,000 miles on it, and it has been 25,000 miles since the original engine was replaced.
I would use the term the way that zwede and SpyOne use it. Unfortunately, I can’t assume that the person posting the ad wasn’t jz78817 or Bijou Drains. That means to know what it means in any particular ad, I need to ask the person who posted the ad. There is no other way to be sure.
sure there is, nuke it from orbit.
When cars didn’t last so long, it was very common for odometers to roll over from 99,999.9 miles to 0.
So traditionally, original miles indicated that the odometer hadn’t yet rolled over. I still own such a car, with about 30,000 miles since the second rollover.
Now mechanical odometers are passe’, but when you see one, it usually has one more digit, so all the miles are likely to be original.
On the old odometers, when hitting a hundred thousand miles, it would turn over and start a 1 again. Thus, 60,000 original miles means exactly that and not 160,000 miles.
I’d always heard it as ‘actual miles’.