Interesting Phenomenon with used cars in Poland

If you search on a used car website and type in 0-5000 km. It is surprising that most of the cars that fall under this description are to be found in Poland with 0 or just 1 km on the odometer. Even more surprising is how many of them are 10 years old or more.

Have you tried to find the monument of King Sisigmund the Third for sale on the Web? I'm sure there are several offers, too.

It's a lot less surprising when you cross the border into Poland at Słubice and within 10km you have about three places offering 'legal' correction of odometers. Totally illegal, of course - but no-one's enforcing the rules.

No, it is entirely legal to change the reading on an odometer; the crime would be selling a car which has an altered odometer.

Fair point: that said, what's your estimate of the correlation between vehicles with newly-altered odometers and them being put on the market? Caveat emptor still applies here, for the most part.

I'd say that it is pretty much identical to the correlation between being a plastic Pole and being an utter twat.


Very very much so. I used to think that a company which sold warranteed used cars would make a fortune but then I realised that few Poles would pay the extra amount such a place would need to charge.

Friends... It is for example illegal to have an anti-radar device (so you could detect speed-check) operating in your car but it is legal to sell and own such devices ;)

"Nie na nas Polaków zakazy!" ;-)
And I've heard the Kolumna Zygmunta III in Warsaw changed hands several times ;)
On topic: Horse-painting has been a technique known for ages.

From my West Poland perspective, the numbers wouldn't stack up. You're better off driving over to Germany and getting a de facto warranted car there (the laws are far better enforced) and you also save the 20+% markup imported cars tend to command when sold here.

With a bit of clever planning, it is perfectly legal to own and use a laser speedgun jammer.

On more serious note:
Many Poles need to earn their "green dollar" in any way and it is true many Poles are way too smart in it. Just imagine a small businessman, a tradesman distributing machinery & tools, also owning a small forwarding company. The guy lives in his car, making perhaps 350.000 km over 3 years. The car is not that old but it is used up. So the guy turns the setting of the odometer down and tries to sell the car as a regular 3-year old one. Yes, the car is formally 3 years old, and the guy commits an offence.

His thinking is like that: "I need money for the next new car and I don't care". Now, anybody understanding cars will see the steering wheel and the gear lever completely worn out. Someone unaware will buy this car.

I do not excuse such people like the businessman> I describe what you might expect.

you mean someone is too lazy to type the data into the form? ("Why should I bother no one will believe it anyway")

or maybe it's quite true ... the car that now exists has come fresh from the "make 1 car from n" workshop. an e pluribus unum moment.

shouldn't this thing be called hodometer rather than odometer (there is a term hodograf in Polish geological vocabulary that I couldn't find in English)

If following the Greek etymology strictly, then yes. But convention has bequeathed us odometer. BTW Latin importations from Greek (in the Roman period, I mean now) often equivocate between written and unwritten 'h', as in harena -- arena.

Even then, the socially aspiring would insert initial 'h' wrongly in an attempt to be hyper-correct (used to be a common feature of English lower-middle-class speech) - there is a poem by Catullus satirising the practice from around 40BC.

thanks for clearing this thing :)

btw etymology online insists there is a direct connection with the Greek word hodos (way) with Slavic 'chodit' (Polish chodzić)

btw cars with real readings of 0-5000km in Poland were in fact hardly used - I knew people who owned but hardly used their cars - but it is a thing of the past rather

b]H[/b]odograph exists too, with the same etymology. Very different thing, though.

these were mostly elderly people

Regarding the silent "h": As you know, there is no "h" in Italian. The say "'otel" for example. Once (as a teen) I wanted to impress my friend and told him my Italian granny of Southeast Polish origin grasped the Italian manner to the extent she dropped her "h's". he demanded an example. So I said:

-- She would say "Zjadłabym arbuza" (I'd eat some watermelon)
My friend looked at me strangely and replied:
-- Did you mean she should say "Zjadłabym harbuza?!"

Well, "harbuz" was the fact but in Mickiewicz's times :))))