Hey, so my sister in law has the meanest parents I have ever met in my life. She is only allowed to drive her 1999 a certain amount of miles a week just because they are major jerks. They bought her other sister a BMW, but she got a really torn up Stratus. My question is, is there any way I can wire in a switch to turn off the odometer so she can have a little freedom? I'm just trying to figure out a way to make her life a little easier. Also, I understand that this might turn the speedo off as well. HELP!! lol.

 

If you disconnect the output speed sensor , it will kill the speedo/odometer , the trouble is a believe that it will also put the cars tranny in limp mode as the TCM will no longer get pulses either ..Unsure if you could break the line going into the cluster to get it to work

 

I would locate the service manual and find the wiring diagram. Maybe snip the right wire on the back of the cluster going to the odometer, and put a switch on it, hidden of course. There you would have the option to turn it on and off.

Im not sure the legalities of it though, since tampering with a cars mileage is a no-no. Let us know how it goes.

 

Honestly i would not do that if i was u because that would be illegal. When u resell the car the odometer could only say for example "50,000" when really there is more miles on the car. I think that is under the category of fraud.

 

Hey, thanks for the replies. I know it's illegal to tamper with it, and I wouldn't even think of doing it, but the car is a serious POS, dented all to hell, breaking down, etc. I think the least of the worries a buyer would have getting this car would be the mileage being a smidge off, lol. She would only be flipping off the odometer when she's grounded, so it wouldn't end up being very inaccurate in the long run. I might look into the gauge cluster to see if I could get a wire ran for it, but I am in the dark here. Would it work if I spliced in a switch on the speedo wire?

 

on my 2000, the cluster gets is readings from the computer, shut off the cluster, car still knows and will display correctly when it's turned back on. You'd have to disable sensors, and have it fall to limp mode

Even if you're not going to sell the car in the future, it can still be considered insurance fraud (claiming less miles driven, insurance likely won't cover an accident if they find an odometer kill switch)

Or... kill the florescent display so they can't see how much has been driven and have the sis-in-law make sure the gas gauge reads the same when she gets home as when she left.