Why did auto manufacturers, as recently as the '90s, install odometers that couldn’t display anything over 100k miles? Did they not expect their cars to make it that far? Was it really that much more expensive to produce a 6-digit reader?
Five digit odometers seemed more than ample for most cars for many decades, and realistically were adequate for cars that were unlikely to last longer than 200,000 miles (the difference between, say, 30K miles and 130K miles usually being pretty obvious). Until recently, when the prospect of many cars lasting longer than 200K became common, the was no compelling reason to call for a new design. It probably wasn’t much more expensive, but anything even a little more expensive can be significant when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of cars. So I would say they held out until it appeared it had to be done, or a new odometer design was being made for other reasons (e.g., electronic vs. mechanical).
US car manufacturers assumed in the 50s and 60s that you’d trade in your car every 3 years, so going over 100K was not considered a good thing. The psychology was that the driver would see 100K as a limit and would trade in the car, and it was probably right for a time.
And once something is done a particular way, the practice can hang on for a very long time, even when obsolete.
As a tangent…
Why do some gas stations, when using their corporate fleet cards, assume that a car has only five digits worth of mileage?
It’s kind of annoying, because it never tells you if it’s a five-digit machine or not. So, I punch in six digits and it says, “No tenths, please”.
Pssst…BP…you can have a car with more than 99999 miles on it…
-Joe
A fleet card is more concerned with mileage changes than the absolute mileage.
Sure, but if I fill up and put 125,000 on Monday and 25,400 on Thursday…
-Joe
I have a reference (that I can’t cite, unfortunately) that indicates that in NY state, all 1993 MY and later cars required six digits for the whole miles. No one’s going to make separate odometers for NY versus the rest of the country.
It was also common to already have six digits back in the day. For some reason people were always worried about those 10th. I imagine it has something to do with the lack of trip computers in those days. I can’t recall seeing a modern car in many, many years that has the tenths included in its total mileage odometer. In any case, by dropping the 10ths, there’s really no increased costs in going to six digits for whole miles.
Today I have to imagine that mechanical digit odometers no longer exist (well, they exist, but not for new cars).
Mechanicals are still being made, but they are indeed becoming less and less common. Which really suck in my line of work because I need to know mileage in order to set the value of a car. Smash the front end of a car and guess what…no odometer!