The recent findings by the AA are of no surprise to Niall Cunningham, Director of Cunningham Higgins Specialist Cars. "While people believe that the clocking is happening in the UK before the cars are dumped on the Irish market, the reality is that at least half of the cars are being "clocked" in this country after they arrive in, and often not until after they are registered, as it costs less to register a car with higher mileage", says Cunningham. 

"We do not want to suggest that the Irish motor industry is full of "dodgy car dealers" that are clocking cars (many people already think this) but the issue is that there are hundreds of so called dealers that import a small number of used cars that they buy at auction in the UK. They often do not have any proper trading premises so, coupled with the fact that they can make extra money by clocking their cars, they can undersell the main dealers as they do not have the investment in proper premises made and have little or no overheads other than thier own wages."

"We are not anti UK imports as we source a lot of our stock ourselves in the UK. But we offer full mileage verification for all the cars that we sell, and actually one of the checks we carry out is the one that the AA used to find if the cars surveyed were clocked or not!. Without mileage verification and also a full service history, a UK car is of no value, no matter how cheap it is.

We believe that until it is not possible for individuals to import multiples of used cars and subsequently resell them without any responsibility to their customers, clocking cars will continue in this country."

According to Niall Cunningham, one way to watch for a clocked car is to check for a full, stamped service history. Often when a car is clocked, the perpatrator will "loose" the service book to hide previous services at higher mileages. "In our experience, more often than not if a car has a full set of handbooks with just the service book missing, it was clocked", says Cunningham.

Please click here to read a copy of this Irish Times article.