re electronic odometers was used bmw question i consulted with someone working on an electronic odometer the design was to use a microprocessor based system to write a somewhat ofuscated pattern into an eeprom the idea was to make the circuit difficult to program arbitrary values into the eeprom the secondary purpose acutally the primary purpose from the standpoint of practicality was to distributed the writes so as to avoid exceeing the maximum number of writes fof the eeprom being used the microprocessor also ignored pulses coming from the hall effect at a rate any higher than mph so as to make spoofing the reading by bench pulsing at least somewhat undesirable this was for an automobile that was not expected to ever exceed mph in operation the case of course might not be the same for your rx the ecm modules of some cars do indeed store info about conditions under which cars have been operated since steering angle and velocity data etc is available it would not be difficult to collect all sorts of interesting demographic information about the drivers use of the car i am not aware of any manufacturer currently trying to enforce warranty restrictions based on reading out use data from the ecm while it could be a potential invasion of your privacy for manufacturers to have access to data about your driving style it could also provide valuable information from actual field use conditions to help engineer more appropriate cars i personally wouldn t mind the dealer collecting my driving demographics as long as it is done in an anonymous fashion bill mayhew neoucom computer services department rootstown oh usa phone wtm uhura neoucom edu n wed
