Today, of course, every new car sold in America will cheerfully register six digits on the dashboard, which is appropriate because the average privately owned vehicle on the American road is 12.6 years old and has racked up close to 150,000 miles. It’s now common for banks to offer a five- or six-year term on used cars and trucks that already have over 100,000 miles on the clock. This dramatic change in our automotive fortunes reflects significant quality improvements across the industry more than it does economic stagnation, but it raises the question: Have odometer readings become irrelevant?

That’s a trick question. They always were.

If my friend’s Maverick-driving father has a modern equivalent, perhaps it’s Nader Assaad, who just “turned over” the odometer on his 2014 Lexus CT200h and posted the evidence on Reddit. Since the Lexus has a six-figure odometer, that means it’s done a million miles in just 12 years. His photographs show a clean car in straight and unblemished condition, and he fully documents every bit of his exhaustive maintenance program. On a whim, I compared Assaad’s car with a Lexus of the same year and model, chosen at random from the internet.

You’d think that a car with just 106,737 miles would be a better bet than a million-miler, but a quick investigation showed some significant damage in the vehicle history, plus a service record that became spotty at about the 50,000-mile mark. The interior bore signs of significant wear and a desperate, Armor-All-laden detailing. I can’t see any scenario where I would purchase this “low-miles” Lexus over one with almost 10 times as much mileage, but with all the other factors in its favor.

In fact, the original purpose of the odometer had nothing to do with documenting wear and tear on a car. The “trip odometer” didn’t yet exist, and there was certainly nothing like GPS, so in an era of maps and written directions, the ability to do some on-the-fly odometer math was necessary to know approximately when you’d reach the next turn or exit.

How did we get into the habit of using odometer readings as a shorthand for vehicle conditions? It probably happened around the time the average used-car dealer figured out how to “roll back” the gauge. At that point, “low miles” became an easy selling point and a way to convince customers to pay over the market price for older, less desirable products.

That’s still the case today, which is probably why odometer fraud is still fairly common in the digital era. NHTSA estimates that more than 450,000 cars are “clocked” every year. It’s not just small-time corner lots doing it, either. A class action lawsuit in New Jersey accused FedEx of selling vehicles with repaired or replaced instrument clusters that don’t represent the vehicle’s actual mileage, and failing to inform the buyers accordingly. This would be “clocking” on a massive scale, but ask yourself: Would any reasonably informed person expect FedEx to sell low-mileage creampuffs just for the heck of it?

In fact, if you were a small business owner looking to add a former delivery truck to your fleet, chances are you’d ignore the odometer completely. Instead, you would examine the factors that will actually affect your ability to make money with the vehicle in the future: maintenance records, the presence of rust or corrosion, and the condition of the mechanical bits, especially the engine and transmission. You might take note of total engine hours and engine idle hours, information that’s available in many modern vehicles and pretty much all trucks. Last but not least, you might use a diagnostic tool to query the vehicle computer for trouble codes or problem reports.

Believe it or not, the above methodology works as well for buying a nearly new luxury SUV as it does for picking a used box truck. A $75 OBD-II “scantool” from Harbor Freight or Amazon will give you the total engine hours in nearly any vehicle made during the past decade. If it doesn’t at least vaguely correspond to the numbers on the odometer, that’s a possible indicator of fraud — but it’s also a great way to compare otherwise similar vehicles. There are a lot of ways to rack up mileage, ranging from “Montana highway commuter” to “Manhattan Uber driver,” and you can often figure out which is which from the total engine hours and idle hours.

Maintenance records are also critical, and in some cases, they can be obtained after the fact from dealerships or manufacturers. Looking for a used car? Get the service intervals from the internet and make sure they were followed. As an example, most Hondas need a timing belt every 100,000 miles or every 10 years, whichever is first. When in doubt, go by time. It’s a dirty little secret in the auto business that many car parts wear out over time, not mileage. This is doubly true for every rubber or plastic piece in the vehicle. If you can’t find a record for any required service, assume it needs to be done before you put a single mile on the car, and work that into the price.

If you’re shopping for anything more exotic than an Accord or Camry, you should also get to know a local independent specialist mechanic for your chosen marque. A good “indy shop” can do a pre-purchase inspection for a few hundred bucks. There are at least three ways this will save you that much or more. The inspection could reveal serious problems that make buying that particular vehicle unwise. It can uncover deferred maintenance or other costs that can be negotiated into the purchase. Last but definitely not least: if the dealer is afraid to have the car inspected, there’s probably a reason for that.

F1 FOR EFFORT

Want to buy the best used car you can get? Follow the above steps in order. Use a scan tool to weed out cars with obvious problems. Review the maintenance records to see if it’s worth having the vehicle inspected. Then use an inspection on the car you’re serious about to make sure you’re getting a good one. This is a lot more of a hassle than just opening a car door and waiting for the mileage to pop up on the instrument cluster, but it’s also much less risky.

And if you find a great vehicle by using the above steps, and you manage to put a lot of miles on it, and you want to brag about it to the world, do your children a favor — and don’t.

Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver, a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines, and writer of the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.