Low Mileage Deisels

I am looking at the mo to buy a low mileage diesel ute or small truck. Question; there seems to be a few low low that do not look the part. Is switching the speedo to save road tax a thing or a story. If its a fact that people do . how would I tell or is it just a case of looking whats in front of me.?

What ones did you see . Like i got a 1999 mb140 with let me see i had to update ruc as it was over 172.thousand km if that was tampered with i would not expect more than 100 thousand extra on the engine.
How would I tell or is it just a case of looking what's in front of me that's basically it unless it is a modern Diesel they store mileage in the instrument cluster engine controller transmission and in some cases in the electronic ignition key module. You can then read and compare km with a factory level scanner The engine controller calculates a mileage on run time.

Just carjam the registration plate , that will give a clue

If youre looking to buy a diesel ute I'd buy one brand new or else buy something ex corporate/lease a few years old with a couple of hundred thousand on it with a traceable FSH that you know has been run hot most or all of its life for a much lower price. Anything in between is either excessively priced upfront for used equipment and/or yes could possibly have been fiddled with.

Media articles have described the practice as "Rife" in some regions:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/5036378/Stamping-out-diesel-odometer-meddling RUC evasion is understood to cost the goverment $30m per year (some of that will be truck hubometers rather than light cars):
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/diesel-rucs-tax-when-you-pump/5GYMUPBVMXP2PSGOO2S7LHM2SM/

Really need to do a condition assessment, and not base you buying decision on mileage (I don't feel low mileage is all it is cracked up to be, and worth paying a big premium for. A lot of stuff in cars degrade with age, rather than use.)

Also 200,000km done in low range around a farm, or in heavy city traffic will result in vastly more wear than 200,000km of motorway cruising.

Carjam is worth checking, but won't tell the full story. Evading 100% of RUC charges would be super obvious, so I imagine that people with switches have them on a couple of days a week, and off for the rest. Means the graphs will just look like they are a normal low mileage user.

If service documents are available they can give a clue. The car being serviced 3 - 4 times more frequently than the mileage would dictate can be a give away. As could for example a set of tires that receipts or manufacturing date stamps allow the age (and hence number of KM's they have done based on carjam graph) to be determined. A set of tires that have supposidly only done 10,000km, but are nearly worn out would be an indicator of evasion.

I don't think it is rife in new zealand anymore, the old stuff yes that was easy, new stuff not, no good company would do this, condition will tell you what's what. My ute has only done 21k and it's a 2018, so yes some are used as family wagon others higher k as used for industry. Go on condition and how it drives, do a inspection and look at carjam wof, all good.

it takes me less than 2 minutes to change the odometer on my vw

Absolute_detail,yes I feel sorry for you.