The Malaise Era, a term coined by autojourno legend Murilee Martin, is widely considered a dark era for the automotive culture at large, a time when smog controls choked huge V8s into embarrassingly low power numbers and quality control was on par with the sort of craftsmanship normally found in a bird’s nest. It was a rough time for cars. The malaise magic even filtered down to automotive details in ways you’d not expect, like what I want to tell you about today: the weird things this era did to odometers.
Yes, odometers! Not really the most exciting of automotive components, but a crucial one, I guess, at least when it comes to selling your car or dealing with car legal stuff. They just count miles! But that’s important, I suppose as much as knowing one’s age is important.
During the Malaise Era there were a few things going on that tangentially affected odometers, and affected them in strange ways. Well, maybe two things, really, the smallest possible plural. The things were increased smog controls and equipment, and the emergence of digital and computer technology. There are at least three examples of how these trends affected odometers, and I think you have the right to know about them:
The MGB’s Hidden Odometer Just For The Catalytic Converter
When MG first started putting catalytic converters on their cars, they knew they only had a lifespan of 35,000 miles or so, and an average MGB engine had a lifespan of way more than that, at least 37,000 miles or so. I kid, I kid! I’m sure they lasted way longer than that. Usually.
Anyway, to count off the miles on just the cat, there was a small, special under-hood odometer that connected to the speedometer cable from the transmission, and then another speedo cable went from that to the actual instrument cluster. After the cat odo reached 35,000 miles, it would trip a magnet that would activate a reed switch that would illuminate a light on the car’s dashboard, telling the owner to get their wallet, or something like that. That was usually the result, anyway.
The Aston Martin Lagonda’s Only Odometer Is Under The Hood
The Aston Martin Lagonda is a car we’re quite fond of here at the Autopian, because it’s such a dramatic and striking machine, something of a Noble Failure but still a strangely beautiful machine. Also, our co-founder Beau happens to have a collection of these, including some incredible one-off prototypes. The Aston Martin Lagonda was a bold technological innovator, too, and sometimes that meant that the rest of the world wasn’t really ready for what the car had to offer. Or the technology in the car wasn’t really ready. Maybe both.
A really peculiar example of this has to do with the Lagonda’s odometer. The Lagonda used a bleeding-edge all-digital dashboard that included one of the very few examples of an all-CRT-based dash – at least at first; there were later ones that used more conventional seven-segment numerical displays like that alarm clock everyone had in the 1980s):
Because these instrument clusters were all-digital and in the 1970s, there really wasn’t a lot of knowledge or trust out there about how everything worked, and as a result, legally-critical components like an odometer had to remain mechanical. Actually, I’m not entirely certain that was the reason for this, as it could simply have been Aston Martin’s electronics engineers weren’t really comfortable making an all-digital odometer.
This could be because of the difficulties of data storage that a digital odometer would have required; without power to the car, the odometer number would be lost, and there weren’t persistent flash memory storage options back then. They would have had to record the odometer entry on some sort of magnetic media, like a loop of magnetic tape, but that would have introduced so much more complexity into an already overly-complex system. So, they just did this:
Yes, they just stuck a mechanical odometer in the engine bay, on the fuse box, and with some sort of red security/anti-tamper tag.
I also suppose they could have chosen to do this because they just didn’t want the clunky-looking mechanical odometer ruining the sleek spaceship-look of their digital dashboards. And, besides, how often do you really need to look at your odometer? Why not put it under the hood, right?
Nobody Trusted Digital Odometers Even Though That Made No Sense
Much like the Lagonda example above, even when cars were going to digital dashboards in the early 1980s with more robust and refined technology compared to the old Lagonda, it was thought that digital odometers would be more susceptible to tampering, so digital gauge clusters still had mechanical odometers.
This persisted until the early 2000s, when the technology was able to prove itself to be reliable enough for odometer usage, and as a result the last mechanical odometer on a car sold in the US was the 2005 Crown Victoria.
Before then, though, you’d see digital dashboards with an incongruous-looking mechanical odometer, even though the process for rolling back mechanical odometers was hardly a secret, or even all that difficult, as you can see here:
You’d think just the newness of a digital odometer would have provided some security via obscurity, but I guess that wasn’t good enough for anyone at the time.
Not too much later, the opposite arrangement of elements became common, with analog gauges having inset digital odometers, because the digital ones proved much more resistant to tampering than the old mechanical ones after all:
And while it’s certainly possible to hack digital odometers today, I think you’ll find it’s a lot less easy and requires a lot more skills and equipment to pull off, as you can see in this video:
There’s soldering and hexadecimal conversions and all kinds of mess there. Just embrace the high mileage! It’s a badge of honor!
Man, the Malaise Era was weird.
I look forward to a future where we stop using analog speedometers.
Ah, the finest examples of British electronics design and a car so overbuilt it will outlive the universe itself. Are we trying to set the theme for today?
One car outlived the Crown Vic in terms of having a mechanical odometer – the 2006 Maserati Coupe.
My ’92 F350 has a digital odometer. There is one wire somewhere that occasionally fritzes out. The only apparent causalty is the speedometer cluster and the dome light. It was off for several months, so the odometer wasn’t powered. Not sure how it kept track of the accumulated mileage when life came back to the cluster, or if it even did.
My ’00s Fords both have analog gauges with digital odometers. I find it a visually pleasing, balanced arrangement, as radio (er, infotainment they’d say now) displays had long ago switched to digital.
Aston Martin should have figured out a way to combine the under-hood odometer display with a BCD-output thumbwheel type of control in order to get an easy BCD (binary coded decimal) output of the current odometer reading which could be displayed on the CRT dash. (The ‘thumbwheels’ in this case would be turned by the odometer cable, not by actual thumbwheels.)
What an interesting topic. I’ll have to add the 2005 Crown Vic mechanical odometer fact into my memory bank.
One question I’ve always wondered is if there is credence to the often stated reason for older cars only having 5 digit odometers is simply because auto manufacturers didn’t expect them to last beyond 100K miles.
On an interesting note tying this together, earlier this year my 1985 Ford LTD rolled over its 5 digit odometer to zero (for the 2nd time) while actually on the way to the “Malaise Daze” car show in L.A., hosted by the popular Malaise Motors Facebook group, where it won best of show. That was a fun day.
Seconded on the 5-digit odo question! It was mostly U.S. domestics that did that, right? I seem to recall the Euros (or at least the luxury stuff) having 6?
Yes, this is this the actual story Big LCD and BIG CRT have used to distract Torch and all the other patrons of the VFDs-only club since that time. Honestly though it does seem somehow strange. Was it really an admission that after 100K there’s no way that the paint, engine, frame, body, etc. can’t last even with fastidious maintenance?
Many ’80s VWs (and I think 70s-80s Volvos too, probably lots more) also had a little separate odometer box (albeit with no display or anything) that lit a light on the dash telling you to change the O2 sensor every 30K miles. That was all those first-gen single wire 02 sensors were good for. EXPENSIVE little bastards back in the day, too – $200+ for my ’85 Jetta 2dr sticks in my mind.
My Foden has a boiler hours meter, the steam pressure drives an engraved metal disc which is very very slowly rotated against a scribing tool. It draws a spiral which traces its way between the engraved marks thus affording the operator a simple guide to the time left before the thing is liable to explode. Almost all of the thing is built out stupidly heavy stuff that can be fixed with big hammers and swearing, and then there are bits that require the skills of a master watchmaker. I have an exercise book and a pencil. I write down how many hours it steams for. At the present rate of use it has another 104 years to go. By which time I might have worked out how to fix the boiler meter.
When I had my 1974.5 MGB I picked up one of those under-hood units even though it wasn’t appropriate for my car, just because I thought that, taken out of context, the label “% LIFE USED” make it look like it was methodically counting down the life of the entire vehicle. I kept it even after trading the MGB for my HMV Freeway.
My understanding is that it indicates the service interval for the EGR valve, though, not the catalytic converter.
You had me at “HMV Freeway”.
Correct, for the EGR valve usually, not the catalytic converter. Light would illuminate as the indicator approached the service mileage. Once the EGR valve was decarbonised (the interval was 4000 miles), a special key was used to reset back to zero. Depending on market however, really meaning California emissions in the US, the counter did have double function to monitor the exhaust catalyst life.
I also had a ’74 1/2 MGB. Required some care when ordering parts.
I admit I don’t miss that aspect of it very much. Will it take the ’74 part or the ’75 part? I never found a useful pattern for predicting the answer.
“the last mechanical odometer on a car sold in the US was the 2005 Crown Victoria.” Not sure this is true, the 2006 Maserati coupe gransport we rented some years back for a weekend had a mechanical odometer. I was pretty surprised, but it was just another oddity of an entertaining, but head-scratcher of a vehicle (the automated manual transmission was horrible in a “fun for 4 days” way, stalling the car out in stop and go traffic in excellent places such as the interstate).
Yep. The 2006 Maserati Coupe appears to be the last.
As an embedded software engineer I absolutely love the Lagonda’s solution for odometer. A novel and fragile system for writing it in an EEPROM or just do it in hardware with a lockout tag. HW was absolutely the right choice.
The first EEPROM devices were from 1974. That’s early enough for the Aston Martin to integrate. EEPROM stands for Electrically Erasable Programable Read Only Memory and yo can think of it as a much smaller, much slower flash memory. Fun fact, it’s both an initialism and an acronym because it’s pronounced Eee Eee Prom (highschool dance).
It would have been familiar and available to the engineers of the time because FW development at that point used EPROM (drop the first E from the above) which were erased using UV light.
It’s hard to find technical data on parts this old, but lets go with the best I can dig up and from memory, because I’m old enough that I’ve built systems with both EEPROM and EPROM.
These early EEPROMs were hilariously small by today’s standards. The lower end parts had a whole 32 bytes with the high end parts having maybe 128. They were specced for 10000 write cycles and 10 year data retention.
By being clever with 128 bytes of storage, you could update it every mile for half a million miles but your display would roll over every 65535 miles.
It would be ridiculously sensitive to loss of power during the erase cycle which would happen for 10s of seconds every 60 miles.
So it could have been done, but would it have been a good idea? Oh hell no. But hey, it was a fun bit of nostalgia on my part
Magnetic core memory would also have retained the value, but would also have been vulnerable at times in the read/write cycle.
Bubble memory could have also been an option. Intel had a 1 megabit bubble memory on the market in the late 70.
IIRC it would have fit with the Lagonda eye watering price tag.
I had to look top bubble memory, that’s awesome. And apparently tiny, very cool.
I HATE that digital odometers stop at 999999 instead of rolling over to zero!
The only exception I know of is the EL Falcon from Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCogIA2LMdY
The other exception are all those aughts Toyota Prius/Corolla/Matrix models (and badge engineered versions) that stopped at 299999 because of a software bug. Those are models that absolutely need to go over that threshold given their longevity.
That 299999 Toyota odometer is because the chip or whatever has a88888 instead of 888888
As a Star Trek fan, WTF Odo, indeed. Is Odo hollow like a chocolate Easter bunny? He is the size of an average humanoid, but can shape shift into a tiny mouse and sleeps in a tiny bucket. There is clearly a discrepancy here and I need some hard hitting journalism to find the answer.
You can create some recurring theme (i.e. TorchTrek) where Torch talks about Starships and their engine lighting but goes off on a discussion about Odo. Ples if we only got 1 or 2 articles of TorchTrek before it wandered off to the discard pile, it would fit right in with Mercury Monday or that thing where David was going to do trivia and reward merch from his closet.
He’s not hollow, he’s filled with caramel. Duh!
He’s like a sponge. One of those little tiny sponge toys that “grow” when you put them in water.
I was always disappointed they never really showed him changing forms. I’m assuming budget+available tech back then, but watching the reruns these days, I think how dramatically they’d do it now.
Oh no, I won’t be able to not think about this when I see him!
Maybe:
* He is indeed hollow
* He creates a lattice of hollow cells
* He absorbs moisture from the air (would account for mass difference, but would take ages and dry out the room)
* He absorbs particle dust (giant dust bunny!)
* He creates some sort of solid nitrogen compound to use as a scaffold for his silica cells
* He is bigger on the inside (but then he would be able to travel in time)
“Doctor, if a Klingon were to kill me, I’d expect nothing less than an entire opera on the subject.“
Huh, Today I learned that Murilee Martin == Judge Phil… would have been useful to know 15 years ago.
Phil Greden, a.k.a. Murilee Martin, is also Murilee Arraiac:
https://murileemartin.com/wordpress/?p=1777
Replacing your cat every 35,000 miles makes it seem like BL just wasn’t even pretending to try anymore
I believe they also put warning lights in some cars to alert you to when the cat was about to set the carpet on fire, instead of finding a way to just stop it from doing that
just the content I expect from Torch!
Digital odometers have their own oddities as makers vacillate between parsimony and generosity, LED and LCD. My Ford pickup has a single LED that toggles between odo and trip, while my Mazda has a LCD with a separate trip odometer display that toggles between two trip odometer.
I suppose a similar thing is an outside temperature display. Electronic fuel injection requires a temperature sensor but only some cars bother to display it.
The only temperature sensor on my EFI cars that I’m aware of is the coolant temperature sensor.
Cars that display outside air temp typically have a dedicated sensor in the front of the car for ambient temp.
Maybe these should’ve been called oddometers.
Can an oddometer still count even numbers?