Monday Mileage Champion: Same As It Ever Was… And Will Be…
Forbes recently published an article titled “ Cars That Can Last 250,000 Miles (Or More).”
Unfortunately for the author and Forbes, measuring long-term quality of any new or late model is nearly impossible.
Most defects and cost cutting compromises don’t become glaringly obvious until well after the vehicle becomes a common site at the wholesale auto auctions I frequent. That dependable car of yesterday can easily become a rolling pit of the modern day regardless of what seemed to be the reality.
So, I won’t pretend to know the crystal ball of reliability when it comes to any new car. However older used cars are a panacea of good data from actual owners, and to me that’s the only yardstick that truly matters.
Every week another 6,000 to 7,000 vehicles get added to our Trade In Quality Index. This week 22 out of the top 25 vehicles in overall mileage fell into one of four categories.
- Chevy/Ford Truck Or SUV
- Ford Panther Platform
- Honda Car
- Toyota Everything
The other three vehicles that made the Top 25 this week were two Nissan Maximas and 1 Sentra. I do sometimes see a small blip of high mileage Jeep Cherokees and Jeep Grand Cherokees, Ford Tauruses with the Vulcan V6, not to mention a long line of GM vehicles that came with the 3.8 Liter V6 engine.
Everything else pretty much either makes a brief appearance or two in the list (VW TDI’s, 10+ year old Volvos that have working odometers, pre-1996 Benzes), or is simply never in the running (Jaguar, Land Rover, Audi, SAAB).
What makes a given vehicle last far longer than the norm? Or get curbed at the earliest opportunity? For most of us it comes down to three factors.
1) Ease of repair
2) Overall durability of parts
3) Brand perception
Now normally I would offer everyone here a full drill down of each one and how, let’s say, a 1994 Toyota Camry is infinitely simpler to maintain than a 1994 Mercedes S-Class. Or why a rear-wheel drive Volvo wagon is often seen as worthy of long-term investment, while an older Mitsubishi Galant is often curbed at a far earlier point in time.
But I have the flu. So please, feel free to either support or debunk those three factors. Your Uncle Floyd may have owned a full sized Dodge Van back in the day with a quintillion miles on it. That’s fair. However you may have a different conclusion as to why one model is truly better than another.
Do these three factors reflect why a given vehicle is kept over another? Or am I missing something else in the mix? As Linda Richman would say when she feels a bit tired and vehklempt, “Discuss!”
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There is a 2001 Volvo V70 NA/automatic with 440k miles on eBay right now, that's a testament to longevity. It's a MA/RI car too, show me a decade-old Japanese car that wouldn't be in pieces in that environment. No doubt it took some money to get there, but you can get a modern Volvo to the moon knowing a trusted Volvo specialist, they're out there.
@ Geeber "Out of 25 vehicles vehicles with the highest mileage, 22 fell into one of the four categories of vehicles named by Mr. Lang. Which means that those vehicles were 88 percent of the vehicles with the highest mileage. Even if we add the TOTAL market share of those four manufacturers – GM, Ford, Toyota and Honda – it doesn’t come anywhere near 88 percent of the total market." ------------ Your logic fails where you assumed that the observed result (by the author) is the real distribution. There are two major issues: 1) Raw data bias: certain makes/models may just never enter Steven Lang's 2nd hand car network. Toyota/Honda/GM/Ford may not account for 88% of national sales, but they may actually account for 88% of all the cars that went through this particular network. To have good samples, you would need to find data from DMV, not from a sales network. 2) The choice of "top 25" is random and without explanation. Why 25? Why not top 133? Why not top 54? They all produce different results. Would there be a big gap between No. 7 and No. 8? Would it be more scientific if we use a weighted average for all the cars in that network? If you like it being simple as in "top 25", then please also accept that it will have a margin of error like 30%. Coupled with a margin of error of 40% with the 1st point, you don't really have any useful information here.