6 ms·

Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. Most of people I know have bought vehicles with that mileage and used it for another 100kkm a

Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. Most of people I know have bought vehicles with that mileage and used it for another 100kkm after that at some point in their life (think first/second car, second family car, etc.). It's important to know that especially in Central/Eastern Europe, you can never trust the car's odometer - even the cars I'm talking about had probably more than 350kkm when bought.

sqeaky 9y ago
I have seen plenty of cars not make to 165_000 miles, those that do are often near the end of their life. Mine is beat and barely holding together and it is at 97_000 miles.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Yup, when I donated my car at 145k mi I expected to to be resold but got notified that it was turned into parts for $350(they had to report back to me for tax reasons).
- dom0 9y ago
  97 000 miles, just barely 160k kilometers. That's... really not much at all.
- seszett 9y ago
  165 000 miles is 266 000 km, for the readers who might wonder. My car is at 350 000 km now, and I'm not planning on selling it anytime soon. It doesn't have any special problem, except for a malfunctioning electric window lifter on one side. It's only one data point of course.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    What percentage of car owners do this? There is some percentage of cars crashed in the first week. It only takes a few of these to cancel out the average of extreme outliers like your car. For reference I have never seen an odometer with more than 200 000 on it before. Even most classic rebuilds I have seen like 69 Corvettes have some high 100K count on them, some event have reset odometers.
    - nathancahill 9y ago
      Huh, I drive a Toyota with 205,000 miles on it. Still in great condition after tons of cross-country road trips.
    - Animats 9y ago
      I'm up to 235,000 miles on a 1985 Ford Bronco as the original owner, but that's a 2-ton truck. High-mileage trucks aren't that unusual.
    - apapli 9y ago
      We had a (1988?) family Peugeot 505 station wagon that made over 600,000kms back in the day. Perhaps they don't build them like they used to, but our 1980's Honda sedan also easily clicked over 350,000kms too.
    - seszett 9y ago
      I don't know, but if the average is 220 000 km (according to the article) I'd say a fair share of cars must go beyond that. If I had not bought my car (it was at 300 000 km) I'm pretty sure it would have been sold in Eastern Europe instead, or maybe Africa since it's a Peugeot (a 406). In the countryside, it's also very common to have both a nice recent car, and an old reliable one like mine for the dirty work. Most people I know do have one car that is a few 100 000s of km. Also, we mostly use diesel here, and these are supposed to be much more reliable than the gasoline engines used in the US (and I'm not going into the purported lack of reliability of American cars to begin with). I'm talking about everyday cars that are 15 or 20 years old, not classic cars.
      - dom0 9y ago
        Gasoline engines can be plenty reliable. I think the main reason why a lot of cars from the 80s and 90s are able to go to 400k and more is (1) cheaper and easier maintenance, so more inclined to do it regularly (2) no fancy shit going on, no turbo chargers, no high-pressure fuel injection, thus far less wear on parts, no unreliable high-pressure pumps etc. Replacement parts on these are also far more expensive. New turbo is a four-figure number just for the part. Injection pumps are bloody expensive, too. Less optimized designs may also be a factor. CAD and FEM modelling has only become better with time, so back in the day engineers would rather make a more conservative design, nowadays that's not so necessary any more.
  - ashark 9y ago
    > except for a malfunctioning electric window lifter on one side. There's probably a Youtube video that'll walk you through how to replace it. I replaced the one on the driver's side door of our 2001 Honda Odyssey last year. I think it was like $120-150 (USD) for the part and 3ish hours. I know almost nothing about fixing cars (just generally how to use basic tools), but have used info from forums and (especially) youtube to fix several things like that on our cars. [EDIT] great thing about the Youtube videos is you can get a good idea of whether it's something you can manage yourself before you tear your car apart.
    - visakanv 9y ago
      People making YouTube videos to teach strangers how to do things is one of my favorite things about the human species :')
- TomMarius 9y ago
  Uhh... My own car has around 98k miles (165kkm) and I consider it pretty new.
- dyeje 9y ago
  I had a 98 Jeep Sport Cherokee at 170k miles. One time I ran into a guy with the same car at a Walgreens (same model, same color, same year), we said hi and laughed about it. His had recently hit 300k and was still going strong. Cars can last quite a long time with regular maintenance.
  - jcranberry 9y ago
    I had a friend in high school whose family's Jeep just hit a million miles and was still chugging. Well, that's what Jeeps are for.
- notlob 9y ago
  My 80s diesel Benz is barely broken in at 249k miles. It all depends on the car. Ironically, more modern cars will probably not last as long! I can rebuild just about anything on this car, electronics included (most complicated part is perhaps a common opamp). On modern cars, as soon as the advanced ICs (say an ECU) are NLA you’re SOL.
  - true_religion 9y ago
    Nah, older cars which weren't made well, or maintained well are all sitting in a landfill right now. It's only the few that were both made better, with no production flaws, and great maintenance that have lasted long enough for us to see then with 150k miles before being purchased today.
- mcguire 9y ago
  That was very true of cars in the US before 1990, say. Today's are much better. I have a 2004 Corvette with about 140,000 miles. Stuff breaks, but it is a vette. My last F150 had about 160,000 miles when I, uh, wrecked it. Still looked and drove like new.
- sliken 9y ago
  Buy a subaru next time.
- ridgeguy 9y ago
  My automotive longevity anecdata: '99 Toyota 4Runner, 232K miles (currently own); '85 Honda Civic, 197K miles; '59 VW bus, ~490K miles (with a rebuild of the 40hp engine at ~240K miles and a transaxle from a junker at ~300K miles).
- fnj 9y ago
  > Mine is beat and barely holding together and it is at 97_000 miles. You are ridiculously hard on your capital equipment. It must be nice not to have a care in the world for your expensive possessions. Personally I couldn't bring myself to torture fine machinery like that.
  - demosthenes111 9y ago
    Lots of assumptions in this comment.
IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. I'm not sure it is... I mean, in my country (Netherlands) the average car user drives 13k km per year, in very car heavy countries that's probably around 20k. But here it'd mean a car would last on average 20 years, that's not absurdly low by any standard.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  OK, maybe I misunderstood. To me it seems like it's comparation of incomparable though - you can't fault the vehicle that you didn't use it enough to broke it and had its life ended just because of age. With proper care, the vehicle could go much farther than 500k km with no noticeable performance or range degradations - just like the heavily used Teslas.
- thinkling 9y ago
  Pretty close. In the US, it is commonly assumed that average mileage per year is 15,000mi (24,000km). Maybe someone could write a quick script to scrape AutoTrader.com or a similar site and see what the mileage is on cars over 20 years old that are offered. ;-)
  - TomMarius 9y ago
    Not sure about the US, but in Europe, you can never trust the odometer. Displayed mileage is often a third or a quarter of the real mileage.
sorenjan 9y ago
I've never seen anyone put more than one kilo before the unit before.
- dom0 9y ago
  Well Americans did (sometimes still do) use micro-micro, as in µµF.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  For me, it's normal to write "its mileage is 165k" - and the "km" is assumed. I just wanted our friends that use imperial units to understand, you're true it's non-standard, and it's actually the first time I wrote it like that.
- elihu 9y ago
  I guess it's less confusing than using "mm" for "megameters". "I drove my car 266mm" doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment.
  - kmonsen 9y ago
    mm is millimeters though, so that would be about a quarter of a meter. I guess Mm would be what you are looking for.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      The capital letter doesn't add much to the sound of it.
hwillis 9y ago
>Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. It appears to be the consumer reports data. [1]: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_news/t/whats-life-expectancy-my-car/#.WaiYaLJ96Uk http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_news...
- moepstar 9y ago
  Add one or two zeroes at the end and i'd guess we'll be more in the ballpark..
  - hwillis 9y ago
    what...? You're saying cars can drive 1.5 to 15 million miles on average? They barely ever make a million miles[1]. [1]: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/ive-been-using-a-950000-mile-lexus-as-a-daily-driver-262222 https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/ive-been-using-a-950000-...
    - moepstar 9y ago
      Well, after googling "ICE car" i can see my mistake :) Being german, i immediately associated ICE with the train of Deutsche Bahn[1] which probably do around that mileage... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express
graylights 9y ago
Sounds like a case of survivors bias. Cars totaled in accidents likely bring down the average.
- radiorental 9y ago
  And Fiats.
robryan 9y ago
It is more about when the car is costing you enough per year to fix that paying for a new one would be cheaper overall. Also perceived safety/ convenience, a car might be good for another 100k km but appear unreliable enough that it might break down at any time.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  My sister spent $2000 on a Daewoo sedan like 6 years back, it needed constant repairs and didn’t have working climate control - the thing only had like 80K miles on it. Total waste of money, but she kept fixing it up and wasted thousands of dollars before eventually junking it. Meanwhile, the 2006 Prius I bought two years ago just hit 110K miles (purchased with 80K miles), cost $10K, and has needed nothing more than new tires and a replacement cooling block on the engine (which was deferred by the previous owner). I plan on running this thing until they no longer can service it, a full swap of the hybrid transaxle is relatively cheap as is replacing the engine, but with regular maintenance they’ll probably last 500K or more and I’ll only have to replace the battery at some point. Always do research on the reliability and cost of repairs on a car before you buy it, this alone was why I picked the Prius over other cars on the lot (there’s very little that can need serious repairs because of how simple the ICE design is, and the electric drivetrain components are pretty long lived as well).
GuB-42 9y ago
I've heard from mechanics that ICE cars are designed to last 250kkm reliably. It doesn't mean that car can't last longer than that, but more and more repairs are to be expected, and it is more likely to fail at any time. If you are a professional, keeping such a car doesn't make economical sense. Furthermore, in high income countries, they actually want you to destroy these old cars to promote the new car market.
- photojosh 9y ago
  I have family who regularly drive old bombs. (Do they call them that elsewhere?) They apparently spend half their life at the mechanic. (Slight exaggeration.) Yeah, I'm not doing that.
- davedx 9y ago
  It depends a lot on whether the ICE is diesel or gasoline. They have very different lifetimes.
aidenn0 9y ago
As a kid being driven around in carpools, and being one of the smaller kids in the neighborhood, I ended up in the middle-front seat a lot (Back when cars had bench seats in the front). I saw exactly one car with over 160 000 km (100k miles) and it was a manual transmission Volvo. I don't know why my friends parents had lower mileage cars, but I know what it was with my mom: At this point most cars were automatic, and they crammed lots of parts of the transmission into a hard-to-service single-part-number item. Three times while I was growing up (~32 000 km per year driving) she had the transmission fail at around 170 000km and the mechanic quoted her a number approximately equal to the street-value of the car to fix.
justinph 9y ago
> Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. People buy a lot of Chryslers, Fiats, Fords, and Chevys. You'd be lucky (or cursed, depending on how much you hate the car) to make it to 266kkm with a Chrysler Sebring, for instance.
- Qub3d 9y ago
  Sebrings, as I recall, require either completely removing the front left tire, or pulling the wheels to the left as far as they go in order to remove the battery, which is housed under the wheel well. Not everyone builds Corollas.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  That's interesting because I know a lot of people with European Fords (Mondeo, Focus), myself and my family included, that went well over 350k km. Are the American Fords so incredibly bad?
  - jandrese 9y ago
    I think it's more that people who never maintain their vehicles don't expect them to last past 100k miles. If you follow the manufacturers suggested maintenance regime in the manual it will last much longer. Unfortunately, this means the used car market is also full of moderate mileage vehicles that require a ton of preventative maintenance as soon as you buy them, giving the used cars a bad name. If you buy a used Chrysler with 100k miles, its probably 40k miles overdue for a timing belt replacement, transmission filter change, radiator flush, alignment, brakes, tires, etc... On the plus side, you probably got it pretty cheap. For one point of reference, Ford was notorious for "value engineering" the old US Rangers so they would die around 150k miles, but I kept mine running for 250k miles and 23 years with mostly just regular maintenance and the occasional repair. The thing that finally killed it was an aftermarket slave cylinder for the clutch that failed and blasted brake fluid all over the inside of the transmission.
    - TomMarius 9y ago
      Not expecting a ~$30k vehicle to run after 100k miles seems absolutely crazy to me. It's a nice showing of how different (wealthier and not caring in this case) the USA are from Europe.
Retric 9y ago
Remember, the average American has one car accident every 17 years. Car accidents are random in nature and significantly reduce average car's lifespan. Further, many cars age without being driven very far per year and 15+ year old cars are often junked even if they are relatively low mileage if they are part of even a fender bender. You also have issues with rust independently from mileage.
elihu 9y ago
It will be interesting to see what the useful lifetime of electric vehicles will be. In theory, they should last a lot longer because they have fewer mechanical parts. So, maybe the older ones will keep running fine but upper-middle-class people won't want to drive them because they look worn and shabby. Which is sort of what happens with gas cars now, but to a greater degree. Maybe 30, 40, and 50 year old cars will become common, assuming the frames don't rust out and someone still makes replacement parts (including batteries, when those eventually wear out). And then there's the software... I don't have a lot of confidence in any company to supply software updates for multiple decades. I hope we don't end up in a scenario where wealthy people have secure vehicles and the less well-off just shrug and accept malware on their car as the price of living in modern times.
- kozak 9y ago
  Or maybe they will go to the junkyard despite being perfectly fine because no one manufactures batteries for that model anymore (and installing a third-party battery is blocked by some DRM).
alkonaut 9y ago
Then there is the average being pushed down by cars scrapped because of accidents or massive failures such as big engine failures with low mileage. Also: Here we have a very strict road legality checkup (joints, breaks, rust, lights, belts, ..) for all cars. Once a bad/cheap car reaches the age when it starts failing the checkup, it's often not worth fixing. So while it could probably do another 100kkm with the dodgy wheel bearing, it's not allowed to without immediate expensive repair. So these checkups effectively purge every car that would need repairs to any vital parts costing more than its worth every year. I have a 10 year old peugeot worth around $1-2k that has gone 18kkm. If it were to fail a checkup for even something simple like a wheel bearing or uneven handbrake appliance - I'd probably hesitate to repair it because I could just as well get another one (A recently checked one for $1k would limp along at least 1-2 years to the next checkup while mine is banned from the road immediately).
jeffhuys 9y ago
kkm, is that kilo-kilometer? Could we also say megameter? I like that word.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  With the side bonus that you can pronounce it "muh-gah-muhteh"[1] to really confuse people. [1] I've never got the hang of IPA, sorry
gpvos 9y ago
ICE = internal combustion engine

sqeaky 9y ago

I have seen plenty of cars not make to 165_000 miles, those that do are often near the end of their life. Mine is beat and barely holding together and it is at 97_000 miles.

vvanders 9y ago
Yup, when I donated my car at 145k mi I expected to to be resold but got notified that it was turned into parts for $350(they had to report back to me for tax reasons).
dom0 9y ago
97 000 miles, just barely 160k kilometers. That's... really not much at all.
seszett 9y ago
165 000 miles is 266 000 km, for the readers who might wonder. My car is at 350 000 km now, and I'm not planning on selling it anytime soon. It doesn't have any special problem, except for a malfunctioning electric window lifter on one side. It's only one data point of course.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  What percentage of car owners do this? There is some percentage of cars crashed in the first week. It only takes a few of these to cancel out the average of extreme outliers like your car. For reference I have never seen an odometer with more than 200 000 on it before. Even most classic rebuilds I have seen like 69 Corvettes have some high 100K count on them, some event have reset odometers.
  - nathancahill 9y ago
    Huh, I drive a Toyota with 205,000 miles on it. Still in great condition after tons of cross-country road trips.
  - Animats 9y ago
    I'm up to 235,000 miles on a 1985 Ford Bronco as the original owner, but that's a 2-ton truck. High-mileage trucks aren't that unusual.
  - apapli 9y ago
    We had a (1988?) family Peugeot 505 station wagon that made over 600,000kms back in the day. Perhaps they don't build them like they used to, but our 1980's Honda sedan also easily clicked over 350,000kms too.
  - seszett 9y ago
    I don't know, but if the average is 220 000 km (according to the article) I'd say a fair share of cars must go beyond that. If I had not bought my car (it was at 300 000 km) I'm pretty sure it would have been sold in Eastern Europe instead, or maybe Africa since it's a Peugeot (a 406). In the countryside, it's also very common to have both a nice recent car, and an old reliable one like mine for the dirty work. Most people I know do have one car that is a few 100 000s of km. Also, we mostly use diesel here, and these are supposed to be much more reliable than the gasoline engines used in the US (and I'm not going into the purported lack of reliability of American cars to begin with). I'm talking about everyday cars that are 15 or 20 years old, not classic cars.
    - dom0 9y ago
      Gasoline engines can be plenty reliable. I think the main reason why a lot of cars from the 80s and 90s are able to go to 400k and more is (1) cheaper and easier maintenance, so more inclined to do it regularly (2) no fancy shit going on, no turbo chargers, no high-pressure fuel injection, thus far less wear on parts, no unreliable high-pressure pumps etc. Replacement parts on these are also far more expensive. New turbo is a four-figure number just for the part. Injection pumps are bloody expensive, too. Less optimized designs may also be a factor. CAD and FEM modelling has only become better with time, so back in the day engineers would rather make a more conservative design, nowadays that's not so necessary any more.
- ashark 9y ago
  > except for a malfunctioning electric window lifter on one side. There's probably a Youtube video that'll walk you through how to replace it. I replaced the one on the driver's side door of our 2001 Honda Odyssey last year. I think it was like $120-150 (USD) for the part and 3ish hours. I know almost nothing about fixing cars (just generally how to use basic tools), but have used info from forums and (especially) youtube to fix several things like that on our cars. [EDIT] great thing about the Youtube videos is you can get a good idea of whether it's something you can manage yourself before you tear your car apart.
  - visakanv 9y ago
    People making YouTube videos to teach strangers how to do things is one of my favorite things about the human species :')
TomMarius 9y ago
Uhh... My own car has around 98k miles (165kkm) and I consider it pretty new.
dyeje 9y ago
I had a 98 Jeep Sport Cherokee at 170k miles. One time I ran into a guy with the same car at a Walgreens (same model, same color, same year), we said hi and laughed about it. His had recently hit 300k and was still going strong. Cars can last quite a long time with regular maintenance.
- jcranberry 9y ago
  I had a friend in high school whose family's Jeep just hit a million miles and was still chugging. Well, that's what Jeeps are for.
notlob 9y ago
My 80s diesel Benz is barely broken in at 249k miles. It all depends on the car. Ironically, more modern cars will probably not last as long! I can rebuild just about anything on this car, electronics included (most complicated part is perhaps a common opamp). On modern cars, as soon as the advanced ICs (say an ECU) are NLA you’re SOL.
- true_religion 9y ago
  Nah, older cars which weren't made well, or maintained well are all sitting in a landfill right now. It's only the few that were both made better, with no production flaws, and great maintenance that have lasted long enough for us to see then with 150k miles before being purchased today.
mcguire 9y ago
That was very true of cars in the US before 1990, say. Today's are much better. I have a 2004 Corvette with about 140,000 miles. Stuff breaks, but it is a vette. My last F150 had about 160,000 miles when I, uh, wrecked it. Still looked and drove like new.
sliken 9y ago
Buy a subaru next time.
ridgeguy 9y ago
My automotive longevity anecdata: '99 Toyota 4Runner, 232K miles (currently own); '85 Honda Civic, 197K miles; '59 VW bus, ~490K miles (with a rebuild of the 40hp engine at ~240K miles and a transaxle from a junker at ~300K miles).
fnj 9y ago
> Mine is beat and barely holding together and it is at 97_000 miles. You are ridiculously hard on your capital equipment. It must be nice not to have a care in the world for your expensive possessions. Personally I couldn't bring myself to torture fine machinery like that.
- demosthenes111 9y ago
  Lots of assumptions in this comment.

IkmoIkmo 9y ago

> Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. I'm not sure it is... I mean, in my country (Netherlands) the average car user drives 13k km per year, in very car heavy countries that's probably around 20k. But here it'd mean a car would last on average 20 years, that's not absurdly low by any standard.

TomMarius 9y ago
OK, maybe I misunderstood. To me it seems like it's comparation of incomparable though - you can't fault the vehicle that you didn't use it enough to broke it and had its life ended just because of age. With proper care, the vehicle could go much farther than 500k km with no noticeable performance or range degradations - just like the heavily used Teslas.
thinkling 9y ago
Pretty close. In the US, it is commonly assumed that average mileage per year is 15,000mi (24,000km). Maybe someone could write a quick script to scrape AutoTrader.com or a similar site and see what the mileage is on cars over 20 years old that are offered. ;-)
- TomMarius 9y ago
  Not sure about the US, but in Europe, you can never trust the odometer. Displayed mileage is often a third or a quarter of the real mileage.

sorenjan 9y ago

I've never seen anyone put more than one kilo before the unit before.

dom0 9y ago
Well Americans did (sometimes still do) use micro-micro, as in µµF.
TomMarius 9y ago
For me, it's normal to write "its mileage is 165k" - and the "km" is assumed. I just wanted our friends that use imperial units to understand, you're true it's non-standard, and it's actually the first time I wrote it like that.
elihu 9y ago
I guess it's less confusing than using "mm" for "megameters". "I drove my car 266mm" doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment.
- kmonsen 9y ago
  mm is millimeters though, so that would be about a quarter of a meter. I guess Mm would be what you are looking for.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    The capital letter doesn't add much to the sound of it.

hwillis 9y ago

>Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. It appears to be the consumer reports data. [1]: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_news/t/whats-life-expectancy-my-car/#.WaiYaLJ96Uk http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_news...

moepstar 9y ago
Add one or two zeroes at the end and i'd guess we'll be more in the ballpark..
- hwillis 9y ago
  what...? You're saying cars can drive 1.5 to 15 million miles on average? They barely ever make a million miles[1]. [1]: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/ive-been-using-a-950000-mile-lexus-as-a-daily-driver-262222 https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/ive-been-using-a-950000-...
  - moepstar 9y ago
    Well, after googling "ICE car" i can see my mistake :) Being german, i immediately associated ICE with the train of Deutsche Bahn[1] which probably do around that mileage... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express

graylights 9y ago

Sounds like a case of survivors bias. Cars totaled in accidents likely bring down the average.

radiorental 9y ago
And Fiats.

robryan 9y ago

It is more about when the car is costing you enough per year to fix that paying for a new one would be cheaper overall. Also perceived safety/ convenience, a car might be good for another 100k km but appear unreliable enough that it might break down at any time.

snuxoll 9y ago
My sister spent $2000 on a Daewoo sedan like 6 years back, it needed constant repairs and didn’t have working climate control - the thing only had like 80K miles on it. Total waste of money, but she kept fixing it up and wasted thousands of dollars before eventually junking it. Meanwhile, the 2006 Prius I bought two years ago just hit 110K miles (purchased with 80K miles), cost $10K, and has needed nothing more than new tires and a replacement cooling block on the engine (which was deferred by the previous owner). I plan on running this thing until they no longer can service it, a full swap of the hybrid transaxle is relatively cheap as is replacing the engine, but with regular maintenance they’ll probably last 500K or more and I’ll only have to replace the battery at some point. Always do research on the reliability and cost of repairs on a car before you buy it, this alone was why I picked the Prius over other cars on the lot (there’s very little that can need serious repairs because of how simple the ICE design is, and the electric drivetrain components are pretty long lived as well).

GuB-42 9y ago

I've heard from mechanics that ICE cars are designed to last 250kkm reliably. It doesn't mean that car can't last longer than that, but more and more repairs are to be expected, and it is more likely to fail at any time. If you are a professional, keeping such a car doesn't make economical sense. Furthermore, in high income countries, they actually want you to destroy these old cars to promote the new car market.

photojosh 9y ago
I have family who regularly drive old bombs. (Do they call them that elsewhere?) They apparently spend half their life at the mechanic. (Slight exaggeration.) Yeah, I'm not doing that.
davedx 9y ago
It depends a lot on whether the ICE is diesel or gasoline. They have very different lifetimes.

aidenn0 9y ago

As a kid being driven around in carpools, and being one of the smaller kids in the neighborhood, I ended up in the middle-front seat a lot (Back when cars had bench seats in the front). I saw exactly one car with over 160 000 km (100k miles) and it was a manual transmission Volvo. I don't know why my friends parents had lower mileage cars, but I know what it was with my mom: At this point most cars were automatic, and they crammed lots of parts of the transmission into a hard-to-service single-part-number item. Three times while I was growing up (~32 000 km per year driving) she had the transmission fail at around 170 000km and the mechanic quoted her a number approximately equal to the street-value of the car to fix.

justinph 9y ago

> Average life of ICE vehicles can't be 266kkm, that's absurdly low. People buy a lot of Chryslers, Fiats, Fords, and Chevys. You'd be lucky (or cursed, depending on how much you hate the car) to make it to 266kkm with a Chrysler Sebring, for instance.

Qub3d 9y ago
Sebrings, as I recall, require either completely removing the front left tire, or pulling the wheels to the left as far as they go in order to remove the battery, which is housed under the wheel well. Not everyone builds Corollas.
TomMarius 9y ago
That's interesting because I know a lot of people with European Fords (Mondeo, Focus), myself and my family included, that went well over 350k km. Are the American Fords so incredibly bad?
- jandrese 9y ago
  I think it's more that people who never maintain their vehicles don't expect them to last past 100k miles. If you follow the manufacturers suggested maintenance regime in the manual it will last much longer. Unfortunately, this means the used car market is also full of moderate mileage vehicles that require a ton of preventative maintenance as soon as you buy them, giving the used cars a bad name. If you buy a used Chrysler with 100k miles, its probably 40k miles overdue for a timing belt replacement, transmission filter change, radiator flush, alignment, brakes, tires, etc... On the plus side, you probably got it pretty cheap. For one point of reference, Ford was notorious for "value engineering" the old US Rangers so they would die around 150k miles, but I kept mine running for 250k miles and 23 years with mostly just regular maintenance and the occasional repair. The thing that finally killed it was an aftermarket slave cylinder for the clutch that failed and blasted brake fluid all over the inside of the transmission.
  - TomMarius 9y ago
    Not expecting a ~$30k vehicle to run after 100k miles seems absolutely crazy to me. It's a nice showing of how different (wealthier and not caring in this case) the USA are from Europe.

Retric 9y ago

Remember, the average American has one car accident every 17 years. Car accidents are random in nature and significantly reduce average car's lifespan. Further, many cars age without being driven very far per year and 15+ year old cars are often junked even if they are relatively low mileage if they are part of even a fender bender. You also have issues with rust independently from mileage.

elihu 9y ago

It will be interesting to see what the useful lifetime of electric vehicles will be. In theory, they should last a lot longer because they have fewer mechanical parts. So, maybe the older ones will keep running fine but upper-middle-class people won't want to drive them because they look worn and shabby. Which is sort of what happens with gas cars now, but to a greater degree. Maybe 30, 40, and 50 year old cars will become common, assuming the frames don't rust out and someone still makes replacement parts (including batteries, when those eventually wear out). And then there's the software... I don't have a lot of confidence in any company to supply software updates for multiple decades. I hope we don't end up in a scenario where wealthy people have secure vehicles and the less well-off just shrug and accept malware on their car as the price of living in modern times.

kozak 9y ago
Or maybe they will go to the junkyard despite being perfectly fine because no one manufactures batteries for that model anymore (and installing a third-party battery is blocked by some DRM).

alkonaut 9y ago

Then there is the average being pushed down by cars scrapped because of accidents or massive failures such as big engine failures with low mileage. Also: Here we have a very strict road legality checkup (joints, breaks, rust, lights, belts, ..) for all cars. Once a bad/cheap car reaches the age when it starts failing the checkup, it's often not worth fixing. So while it could probably do another 100kkm with the dodgy wheel bearing, it's not allowed to without immediate expensive repair. So these checkups effectively purge every car that would need repairs to any vital parts costing more than its worth every year. I have a 10 year old peugeot worth around $1-2k that has gone 18kkm. If it were to fail a checkup for even something simple like a wheel bearing or uneven handbrake appliance - I'd probably hesitate to repair it because I could just as well get another one (A recently checked one for $1k would limp along at least 1-2 years to the next checkup while mine is banned from the road immediately).

jeffhuys 9y ago

kkm, is that kilo-kilometer? Could we also say megameter? I like that word.

zimpenfish 9y ago
With the side bonus that you can pronounce it "muh-gah-muhteh"[1] to really confuse people. [1] I've never got the hang of IPA, sorry

gpvos 9y ago

ICE = internal combustion engine