It wasn’t long after we hit the Natchez Trace Parkway in 2014, at the beginning of our full-time RV life, that we noticed something was wrong with our odometer. The numbers didn’t add up. We knew exactly how far we were driving every day, and the odometer was counting way more miles than that.
Some time later, I was driving Meriwether and noticed a little dot on our odometer next to a “K.” There was also an “M”…with no dot beside it. In my infinite wisdom, I told Eric about this later. “Do you think the ‘K’ stands for kilometers, and that’s what the dial has actually been counting all this time?” The switch below the speedometer/odometer didn’t do anything when we pressed it, so we were left wondering.
Eventually, we talked to our friend, Tiffin Marketing Manager Mark Richardson, to see whether he had any insight. He told us there was a wire in our dashboard console that could be unplugged, causing the odometer to read improperly, and disabling the toggle switch.
We bided our time until last month, when we visited our go-to mechanic shop in San Antonio, Iron Horse RV. In the course of our services (which I need to write a separate article about), we had our tech find and connect the dashboard wire.
Ta-da! Our odometer suddenly dropped from 125,285 (kilometers) to 77,849 (miles). When 1 kilometer equals 0.6 miles, it kinda makes a difference.
All that to say that our 2004 rig has less than 78,000 miles on it after our two and half years of ownership and full-time travel, when we bought it thinking it had something like 100,000 miles. That’s actually only 62,000 miles-a huge disparity!
Quite frankly, I don’t see it as any big advantage that our rig only has 78,000 miles. Diesel RVs should be run regularly, so there’s no harm in packing the miles on provided proper maintenance is taking place. I’m just glad we finally got to the bottom of this odd situation. It only took us two and a half years to figure out.
-B
