Ford Made a “Million-Mile Odometer” Just for New York State

The average American drives around 13,500 miles annually, though the distance we travel tapers off considerably as we age. In our lifetimes, most of us won’t accumulate 1 million miles, combined, across however many cars we own. That fact may have been lost on Ford in the early 1990s, when the automaker took a rather unusual approach to phase out five-digit odometers in favor of the six-digit layout that is compulsory today. Thus was born the “Million Mile Odometer.”

Ford whimsically called its six-digit setup a “Million Mile Odometer,” both in its internal documentation and, rather unusually, on the federally mandated window sticker affixed to every new car as it rolled out of the factory. (The omission of a hyphen between “million” and “mile” was Ford’s grammatical oversight, not ours.) 

Odds are you’ve never heard of this, unless you lived in or near New York State at the time. (More on that in a bit.) So, did Ford genuinely expect owners of its Mustangs to put 1 million miles on their cars? Probably not, but here’s why these optimistic odometers happened anyway:

Six-Digit Odometers Were Designed to Combat Fraud…

A fun aspect of the once-ubiquitous five-digit odometer was that it didn’t take all that much driving to watch one reset to 00,000.0 miles. Irv Gordon, the New Yorker who drove a Volvo P1800 more than 3 million miles during his lifetime, certainly knew that. He watched his red Volvo’s Smiths odometer flip over at least 30 times. 

On the other hand, five-digit odometers make it very difficult to determine a vehicle’s actual mileage. Auction companies, like Hagerty Marketplace, have long used the term TMU, or “True Mileage Unknown” to describe vehicles like this. Unless there’s a big stack of records documenting every service, ensuring that the readout never rolled over, a five-digit odometer car is often sold with the TMU disclaimer simply because of how difficult it is to be certain that the odometer hasn’t reset or been replaced. A well-kept 140,000-mile car can easily pass as a 40,000-mile car.

By the early 1990s, government agencies had fraud on their mind when they began pushing odometer regulations. New York State was the first to specifically require tamper-resistant odometers “capable of showing at least 199,999 miles or kilometers traveled.”

Savvy readers may note that, to the letter of the law, New York did not technically mandate a million-mile odometer. The fact that the state’s regulations specify 199,999 as the minimum highest reading is likely a nod to American Motors Corporation models, like the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, that strangely used six-digit odometers displaying only a blank or the number 1 in the first position. 

…but They also Reflected Longer-Lasting Cars

New York’s regulations had little impact on most automakers’ behavior. Case in point: Volvo began using six-digit odometers in the late 1960s, likely a reflection of confidence in its cars’ longevity. The same number of digits became commonplace in Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche vehicles by the late 1970s. Japanese automakers like Nissan’s Datsun phased them into service beginning in the early 1980s.

All of these cars were from markets where distances are measured in kilometers. Remember: It only takes about 62,000 miles to drive 100,000 kilometers, so it makes some sense that automakers would want odometers to be capable of indicating longer distances.

American and British brands were slower to act, likely due to the miles being the default unit in both markets. Still, Chevrolet put a six-digit mechanical odometer in the redesigned 1984 Corvette alongside an otherwise digital instrument cluster—indicative of consumers’ concern that electronic odometers would be more tamper-prone. Arguably the best example of this worry left a mark on the quirky Aston Martin Lagonda. Don’t look at the digital instrument cluster if you want to know how many miles a Lagonda has traveled; you’ll find the odometer under the hood, where a tamper-tag holds its cover shut. (You’ll also find the fuse panel under a leather-lined lid at the center of the dashboard, because why not?)

Ford Was Late to the Six-Digit Party

A Ford historian told Hagerty Media that archival records indicate the automaker was, as early as 1978, aware of the eventual need to comply with what were then called “extended odometer readouts.” But it took the company until the very last moment to make some of its better-selling models compliant.

Incidentally, 1978 was the first year of production for the third-generation Ford Mustang, known as the Fox-body given that it rode on the automaker’s so-named new mid-size platform. Those ‘79 models rolled out of the River Rouge and San Jose plants with a five-digit odometer, which posed no cause for concern back when Saturday Night Fever was still playing at second-run theaters.

Fast forward to the early 1990s. Ford was getting ready to replace the long-in-the-tooth Mustang with a new, slippery model (SN95) for 1994, including retro details like a dual-cowl dash and headlights with three long elements (facing the wrong way, in this author’s opinion). The SN95 and its all-new instrument cluster weren’t in production yet, and Ford was being forced into compliance by New York’s pending rules, so it created a short-term fix for 1993 Fox-body cars bound for New York—and, allegedly, nearby areas where trades with New York dealers may have been common.

Voila: a six-digit odometer. A sticker on top of the unit reading “MILLION MILE ODOMETER NEW YORK STATE ONLY” marked it apart on the assembly line. And, as previously mentioned, the cars’ window stickers also listed the Million Mile Odometer. (There was no charge for the odometer, the window stickers noted.)

Ford told Hagerty Media that around 2000 to 2500 1993 Mustangs were fitted with the Million Mile Odometer, making it a very small slice of the 115,000-or-so ‘Stangs sold that year. Mustangs bound for police service had a specially calibrated 160-mph speedometer with a six-digit odometer, as well.

Ford also installed six-digit odometers in some 1993 model-year Escort, Ranger, and Taurus models. There, too, the window stickers indicate a Million Mile Odometer.

Government Mandates

The U.S. government dictates many aspects of a vehicle’s instrumentation. For instance, onboard diagnostics must illuminate a check engine light if the system detects a fault related to the emissions system. (This includes a loose gas cap.) The speedometer must be capable of displaying both miles and kilometers, and the instrument panel must be dimmable. Even as digital displays have largely replaced analog clusters, these rules have endured.

In 1980, to discourage speeding, the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard even required speedometers to stop at 85 mph. This cap was soon removed, though some automakers were slow to abandon the practice—including Ford. Just to make things even more complicated in 1993, the four-cylinder Mustang LX got an 85-mph speedo and the V-8 cars got a 140-mph one. The handful of four-cylinder Mustangs delivered new to New York State also had, of course, a six-digit odometer.

Would it have been simpler for Ford to install a single, 140-mph, six-digit odometer in all ‘93 Mustangs? Well, yes, but what’s a dive into a weird car rabbit hole without turning up a strange nugget?