The Odometer Wizard

brings us news of the Odometer Wizard, a handy little tool that claims to program 80% of the speedometers on the market from 1989 to 2005, as well as those on selected '06 models. While this may seem like a slimy used-car salesman's best friend, it has a very legitimate purpose as well, and so I'm not inclined to react in a knee-jerk fashion and call for the banning of such a device. Believe it or not, instrument cluster swaps aren't all that uncommon in the enthusiast world (usually to obtain higher-MPH speedometers or additional gauges that the OEM somehow thought we didn't need), and it's always nice to match the odometer reading with the vehicle's actual mileage. If nothing else, I respect the amount of work that had to go into creating such a tool, for hacking OEM embedded systems is often a nightmarish task.