Trampas wrote:
I have always said it is more than just the car, it is if the owner can
afford the maintenance. I have seen a 1970 Oldsmobile go well over 350k
miles. I have seen Ford Escorts with 200k miles. Generally it all comes down
to keeping the car repaired and maintained. Most people that buy cheap cars
are well cheap and can not afford to keep them maintained.
If you fix every little thing when it goes bad, the car will last forever.
If you wait too long to fix the little things they add up to point where it
is not worth fixing.

Equally important is how the car is used. As an extreme example, UPS package cars are maintained like nothing else, but a Cummins 6BT is lucky to go 300k miles before it wears out; they're often toast at 250k. The Chebby 292s are only good for 120k (yeah, they've still got cars from the late '70s out running around).

Constant heavy loads, abusive drivers, and a couple hundred starts a day add up pretty quickly. Stupid low gearing on some of them doesn't help, either; a 5.81:1 rear end and a four speed with granny first gear has the engine pretty wound up all the time. We'll see how the new Sprinters and MBE900-engined Freightliners hold up, but I'm not expecting much more than the domestic stuff can do.

Meanwhile, my old 300D soldiers on to 350k of easy highway commuting. It still starts in really cold weather no matter how much I neglect the winter maintenance stuff we're all supposed to do. (But I did replace a bad glow plug on Sunday.)

Tom

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