Toyota’s 300,000 km Problem – The Odometer that Stops at 299,999 km on the SCP10 Vitz and Vehicle Inspection

I wrote an article about a year ago explaining that while it’s not uncommon for vehicles to exceed 300,000 kilometers with proper maintenance, some Toyota vehicles from certain model years stop at 299,999 km due to odometer specifications.

The owner who was eagerly awaiting the 300,000 km milestone focused on the odometer to not miss this special moment, but no matter how long they waited, it never counted beyond that figure.

Since then, the owner has been tracking mileage beyond 300,000 km using “Trip B.”

The “Trip B” feature, which resets to zero at 10,000 km, was convenient for tracking mileage beyond 300,000 km since the owner had not reset it since buying the car new and was already using it to manage engine oil change intervals.

2003 model UA-SCP10 1SZ-FE 5MT Mileage 320,000 km

However, the problem arises with the vehicle inspection (continued inspection).
The view of NALTEC (National Agency for Automobile and Land Transport Technology), which handles inspection operations at transport bureaus, is that the 299,999 km display on some Toyota vehicles is considered a non-functioning odometer, resulting in inspection failure.

Meanwhile, Toyota authorized dealers stated, “In this case, we cannot reset it, so we will replace it with a new meter assembly. We will charge for the repair according to warranty regulations.”

Of course, there was no explanation about this when the car was originally sold.

It’s rather disappointing that after cherishing the vehicle for many years, you have to pay for a meter replacement (which isn’t cheap) due to a specification issue, and you won’t even get to see the odometer count up to the milestone.

So I ordered a used meter and tried various approaches while conducting my own investigation.
When disassembling the meter panel, there’s an EEPROM on the internal circuit board that stores the mileage.

Although most people may not know this, analysis results of EEPROM are shared for most vehicle models, and the mileage display can be freely changed using simple commercially available devices (which means the mileage shown on used cars can’t be trusted at all).

When acquired, it displayed “58,767 km” like this,

The reset that the dealer said couldn’t be done,

Can be done like this, and it’s even possible to match any arbitrary distance, such as the mileage at the time of meter replacement if it was replaced before reaching 299,999 km.

Out of curiosity, I tried writing 301,000 km to the ROM, but as expected due to display specifications, it still showed 299,999 km.

From this, it appears that although it seems to be stopped at 299,999 km, it might still be counting beyond 300,000 km internally. If the opportunity arises, I’ll try reading the ROM from the currently installed meter.

The reason I’m writing this article again is simply because the problematic vehicle inspection (continued inspection) is approaching.

After thinking about it for about a year, I couldn’t get it to display over 300,000 km, so I replaced it with a reset meter and passed the inspection.

In the remarks section, the current inspection odometer display value “0 km” and the maximum recorded mileage “290,100 km” were listed together (this time, for certain reasons, the inspection was conducted at the Shiga branch office).

Toyota Genuine Vitz P10 Series 《 SCP10 》 Speedometer P10300-19013698