> Over the years, nearly everything on the vehicle has been replaced or repaired, and Campbell says the only original part is likely the body, and even that has had work done on it.
It’s the Tercel of Theseus: if every part has been replaced, is it still the same car?
If it's a mechanical one, there's a possibility that it's been repaired or replaced. The mechanism after all these years will likely wear out. At the same time, I know someone with a car whose odometer has been at 249,999km for a few years now.
As for (early) digital odometers, does the soul more specifically exist in the EEPROM chip in the instrument cluster* that stores the odometer data?
*at least on my late-90s car, this is how the odometer/trip meter works.
My 2007 Corolla odometer has been at 299999 since 2019. I've replaced the transmission once, but the rest is original, aside from expected maintenance - tires, brakes, fans, etc. - and an added stereo.
Fun fact: The average replacement rate of cells in our bodies (generally speaking) is around 7 to 10 years. So all of our parts have been replaced several times over...
But we can regrow them.
We just evolved an anti-teeth-regrowth substance/molecule that's in our blood and shuts down teeth growth once adult teeth are finished, because adult teeth roots are so deep that they require surgery to pull the old teeth out to make space for new.
Also historically humans didn't live that long, compared to the decade it takes adult teeth to grow.
They're doing phase 2 trials in Japan right now, on children with a birth defect that blocked some teeth from spawning.
The medicine is a monoclonal antibody "antiserum" that neutralizes the teeth-growth-blocker.
Teeth are the proof that God doesn't exist, no celestial being could be dumb enough to create teeth which if not brushed regularly with semi-annual dentist checks rot because of.... foood.
There's a difference between the food that's been eaten over the past thousands of years and the food that we all eat today. I suppose if you look at this the right way, it's another argument in favor of evolution. Teeth are optimized for hunter/gatherer diet and lifespans. Doesn't matter if your teeth rot out by 50 if you die in your 30-40s
In what way can you say that the forces acting on the particle in the western pacific is the same force acting on a completely different particle in that same wave 1000s of miles away when it hits California? It's not by any physical definition. The relationship is purely through the chain of causation over time. In our defining that network of causation as a cohesive system. When a wave interferes with another wave, why do we say both waves died, those energies still exist, when two waves join and magnify each other or cause child waves to branch off in different directions, where does the identity of the wave go?
The answer isn't as sexy as the question. Ontological questions, and therefore mereological questions, are a matter of convention based on how closely-associated relations—like how the "parts" of the "car" function—cohere over space and time.
Yeah, thats the first thought came to my mind as well. It does give me a great deal of satisfaction when a tool, gadget or anything last long with daily use and limited maintenance.
When I lived in Germany, in the 90s, I regularly sat in diesel Mercedes Benz taxis with over a million kms under the hood. Private drivers usually. Many had giant mileages.
We used to say (tongue in cheek) that after 250k, the MB diesel engine was broken in. I don't think MB makes them like they used to anymore.
> I don't think MB makes them like they used to anymore.
You guessed correctly. The 1980's W124 was one of those cars that would keep going and going. Mechanically great, with a galvanized chassis and bodywork that made it also pretty rust resistant.
The 1993 version of the W124, supposed to be an "improved" remodeled version of the original car, was a worst car in every aspect. It rusted, the plastics were cheaper, etc.
The follow-up, the W210, is the model that cost MB dearly. Through cost-cutting and greed, they lost a huge chunk of the taxi market. The car itself was also an absolute rust-bucket piece of cr*p, the interior was also worst, with the whole woes compounded by crappy electronics.
MB as a brand hasn't really recovered from that. The engineering excellency, attention to detail, and engineering pride that made those W123/W124 almost unkillable is lost, and won't be found again.
Unfortunately it's hard to run a car company when your fan base consists of people who only buy used cars. People who buy new cars just don't care what the reliability will look like at 200k miles
It's not just a beauty, is working super fine: and never stops. They made the 200D, 250D, 300D with the same engine, just adding one piston.
My friends comes and go from the EU to Turkey (5.000 km) with no issues at all: on the way he stops at a Turkish dealer of auto parts www.brossautoparts.com where he is able to just get the little plastic parts they get ruined (one was a little plastic wheel on the mileage meters they gave him for free 3 months ago).
In the second hand marked you can find this car for 4.000€ which is a totally ridiculous price !
He told me about the right and left mirror, which are not symmetric: Mercedes made a long research on usability and efficacy on mirrors, and discovered the right mirror can and should be smaller and squared (and, of course, remote controlled), while the left mirror was surprisingly preferred controlled by hand, so there is just a stick of metal (a rudimentary joystick) the driver can hold and move.
The sad is that he told me the second and third series had issues (as somebody else wrote already above) with metals, with the plastic on the side, and unfortunately with the electrical wiring (replaced with a more Eco-friendly version which did not last more then 10 years).
Let's remember the designer: the Italian Bruno Sacco, who had to fight a bit to have the new design accepted: the change from w123 to w124 was a big risk, and they made a test with the Mercedes 190 (a smaller version of the w124): which was a great success of the 80s (the coolest car a youngster could have in Italy at that time).
Yes, it is sad that no factories would consider such a good quality product nowadays: I remember what the famous marketing professor Kotler once told Philips and Braun about their reliable electric razors: "So, you find a customer who buys your razor, and then you make it so reliable that he won’t need another one for the next 40 years? Are you crazy?"
I can confirm as an owner of several W124 vehicles, most notably the 1987 North American market S124, this is the 300 TDT, a station wagon version of the W124 chassis with the OM603 turbo diesel. Currently my wagons clock has just over 370,000 mi. This is a unicorn car in North America. They only sold this car during one sales year in 1987, with this particular engine configuration. This engine can also be found in several other cars around the same era from Mercedes-Benz.
I also own a 1999 W210 with the OM606 turbo diesel. This is the electronically controlled and upgraded version of the OM603. I can confirm that the w w210 is plagued with the myriad of problems. But it is still a fairly nice chassis with modern features and once one becomes acustomized with its particular idiosyncrasies it isn't really that horrible. But it's definitely not the tank that the w124 and w123 series chassis were. The primary prize is the OM606 engine. Which is commonly extracted from the W210 chassis and used to repower any number of other vehicles. There are lots of ways to crank tons of horsepower out of these engines, but at the sacrifice of their longevity.
The W210s did indeed rust badly and the interiors weren't on par with previous generations, but in purely mechanical terms, they were still solid cars. The diesels (particularly E250 TD and E290 TD) could cover 700k+ kilometres without any interventions to the engine or the transmission. The W211 is an improvement to the W210 in almost every aspect, and they are still plentiful on the roads in Eastern Europe.
True, from experience, the E290 TD was mechanically solid. The electronics, less so unfortunately. Ours was plagued by intermittent errors and beeping, together with some parasitic battery drain we could not trace down despite our best efforts.
I didn't have the chance to own a W211, but from what I read and heard, it was indeed an improvement. Even in the looks department!
One of my sons drives a W210 that has now got well over 300K on it and is still running like new. You can see the plastics are drying out and there is some minor rust in places but it is still a very solid car and likely will continue to run for many years to come. It's the kombi version, 320.
We had a W203 station as well, that one definitely was terrible (this was around the time the paint formula change happened), but the e class wagon is much older and still in very good shape. The one part that seems to be plagued by rust is the rear hatch, everything looks good. He's still debating replacing it entirely (the hatch, not the car) or welding it up and respraying it. He's a petty good welder and he really loves that car so there is a good chance he'll end up doing just that but at the same time that is not as good a fix as getting a NOS rear hatch and putting it in marine primer before spraying it.
The W210 was a very good car, the so-called "Camry" of Mercedes-Benz in terms of reliability, except it had one huge problem: rust.
The true "million mile" Mercedes are probably the W123 diesels. Built very solid, they will still rust if you live in areas where road salt is used, but most cars will eventually.
It's weird how some cars are much more prone to rust than others. I had a Toyota truck in the 1980s and it rusted so fast you'd almost swear you could see it happening. Mechanically it never had any problems.
> "Camry" of Mercedes-Benz in terms of reliability, except it had one huge problem: rust.
Absolutely. The rust.. The rust..!!
> The true "million mile" Mercedes are probably the W123 diesels.
Yes, for sure. And the W124 diesels.
> It's weird how some cars are much more prone to rust than others
Different levels of anti-rust efforts. Where Mercedes-Benz truly angered their clients, was by coming up with a new model with a lot worse rust properties. (Well, they cut corners on other things as well, like the quality of the interior, but the rust would be the first thing you'd notice.)
MB had the know-how and the processes in place to make a car less susceptible to rust, and just decided to go with the cheaper option, clients and longevity be damned.
I bought recently a w245: basically I wanted a reliable petrol car that would have a small exterior footprint while being spacious inside (I have 2 teenagers at home) and that I could buy for less than the price of my bicycle.
Only downside is fuel consumption in urban driving.
The W210 did sell, but they did loose an unconditional taxi-driver base in the process. And a lot of loyal customers were truly unhappy with the downgrade and jumped ship.
Those MB diesels made it to the States too, and they were equally well respected here in my experience. Although, there's long been a diesel aversion among some part of the population here, so it was maybe a narrower subset of the population familiar with the legend of the MB diesels.
I drove one for years, acquired when they were available as a quite cheap ~15 year old car. I've since switched to a Toyota and been quite happy with that. I don't know how long the current Toyotas will last, but the golden era Toyotas I think probably last about as well as the legendary MB diesels (with the bonus of not having to track down vacuum leaks).
>there's long been a diesel aversion among some part of the
which is well-justified. Diesels just aren't clean in any sense of the word, and I guess Americans make a lot more short trips which Diesels aren't well-suited for, and are not as concerned with saving on fuel as it's much cheaper.
Diesels are dirty, but I'm doubtful that is where the aversion comes from. Americans are fine with diesel trucks, and, at the time period that the MB diesels are from, emissions wasn't nearly as much of a focus as it is now.
I've heard that one of the supposed reasons for an aversion to diesel sedans specifically is that, during the fuel shortages in the 70's, GM hurriedly built diesel sedans that turned out to be poorly engineered and extremely problematic, and that debacle convinced the public that diesel sedans were a bad idea.
I recall a Greek 240D that had exceeded 4M kM (i.e. 4 GM). Regular motor and transmission rebuilds at intervals that would shame a contemporary dealer's service department.
No diesel engine is made well these days in my opinion, at least as far as passenger vehicles go.
Emissions systems on diesel engines have made the reliability pretty abysmal. That's not to say improving emissions isn't a good goal, but it was implemented terribly.
Between regulators over prescribing solutions and car companies finding the quickest and cheapest "fix" every step of the way, we ended with horribly complex motors that break down much earlier than before. It'd be interesting to see a comparison of total emissions when a 90s diesel is still on the road today compared to a newer diesel that is effectively junk in 10 years or a couple hundred thousand miles.
Given that one single old car without functioning emission controls will stink up an entire block far more than that entire block full of ordinary, modern traffic, I would expect that the (non-CO2) air pollution from an old diesel is far higher than that from building and operating new diesel vehicles.
Even then, a EURO5 diesel still makes quite a stink. Of course, even an EU6+OPF gasoline car still puts out air akin to a dying dog's fart.
ICE vehicles just can't go away quickly enough (and we should aggressively get stinky vehicles like everything pre-EU5 and loud vehicles like motorcycles and scooters off the road first).
I'm not huge on regulation, but if anything MIV is underregulated. Even in the EU anything that was street-legal at some point in the past 70 years is grandfathered in, nevermind that illegal vehicle modifications - if caught - at most earn a slap on the wrist. That's enormously dumb and doesn't fly anywhere else.
A lot of cities have banned them now, at least for personal use. (Last time this was debated in my area, some businesses had justifications for why they couldn't just use electric tools, but none of those applied to regular homeowners.)
A lawn service that is working 8-10 hours a day can't use battery tools unless they buy a lot of batteries and/or have a way to recharge them in the field (from a gasoline-powered generator, most likely). So their complaint has some validity.
Yeah, that's one of the issues they raised. The other issue was that they often get called in for jobs where battery tools simply aren't powerful enough. (e.g. clearing a completely overgrown yard as opposed to regular lawn maintenance.)
I have Ego's bicycle handle brush cutter, think a weed whacker on steroids with a metal blade.
That think does some serious work. I've cleared acres of overgrown mess with it. 2 6aH batteries will outlast me (~2 hours) before I need a break and the fast charger tops one up in maybe 30 minutes.
Lawn mowers are really where batteries fall apart. They go through a charge extremely fast, especially if the grass is even moderately overgrown. Most mowers are meant to be finish mowers where you aren't taking off much grass at all, say 1/4" up to maybe 1". Electric mowers really demand that or you'll run out of juice very fast.
It’s not practical for all crews at present due to costs, but as EVs become more entrenched, the problem will solve itself. You keep an extra set or two of batteries that the truck charges and you swap as needed, not that different from having to stop to refill on gas.
Energy density of batteries is improving too, so the amount of time between swaps will be increasing.
I have 40V electric lawn mower. It takes nearly the full charge on two batteries to cut my average suburban-sized lawn. Sometimes I can't even complete it on that depending how tall the grass is. Add in edge trimming and blowing away the clippings and then multiply that by a number of lawns or larger properties and I think you would need dozens of batteries.
BTW "more convenient and cheaper" are strong arguments when you're in a competitive business. Lawn services are usually just a guy with a truck hustling for customers. The more lawns you can cut the more money you make. Anything that causes downtime such as running out of charged batteries is going to be a large negative.
I have a 40V (well, 2x 20V) mower, and use two pairs of batteries to mow the lawn. But that's fine; between the lawn mower, the leaf blower, the weed whacker, and the snow blower, I've got plenty of spares.
Good enough for what? I'd love to have a lawn mower which can dump grass clippings in my compost pile (mulching them and leaving them behind is better for the lawn, I know, but my wife is allergic to grass so this would basically mean she never gets to use the lawn). Also, we have two apple trees which spend a few months dropping apples on the lawn, so I'd like to have a robot lawn mower which can pick up the apples and toss them in the compost pile too. Oh, and there's a gate separating the front yard from the back yard, so it would be great if it can open and close the gate.
Robot lawn mowers are getting better, but I have yet to see one which can handle every situation that humans routinely handle.
I have a 56V electric lawn mower. It takes nearly the full charge of one battery to mow my slightly larger suburban lawn. Trimming and blowing and what not gets handled by my second smaller battery. My largest battery isn't even the largest they make for this model line. I've been on the same two batteries for five years now. I use E-Go.
I'd say your system is just undersized for your needs. Judging by having two batteries, it sounds like your system is one of those based around hand power tools batteries and then attempted to scale those up to lawn mowers. I've mostly heard bad things about this path. There's a lot of other experiences out there.
We have a large lawn, and a pile of broken eGO products. They wear out fast and cannot be repaired.
We started replacing them witg Milwaukee lawn tools. We frequently hit overheat cutoffs, but haven’t broken any yet. We do have a pile of dead small eGO and Milwaukee batteries though. These days, we only buy the biggest capacity we can. Those tend not to die as fast.
Electric is clearly the future for this stuff, despite our problems. The remaining gas powered stuff is all > 10HP.
It really doesn’t have to. I’d say look at Norway but you’ll dismiss it as a rich country without looking up the actual reason behind their transition’s success. I’d say look at China but you’d say yeah but that’s China.
We can make the same decision and move fast in the direction, we just choose not to
Norway has done a great job transitioning, that's for sure. They are a richer country and that helps fund the massive government spending going into the transition, but I wouldn't dismiss their success either.
It helps that so much of their energy production already comes from hydro, that avoids the challenge of replacing ICE vehicles with electric cars in front of coal power plants.
I haven't been to Norway but I have been to Sweden, I was impressed with their primarily electric public transportation. I'd have to learn more about how Norway handled the transition and how it would translate to the US; for example average commute distance, use of public transportation, etc. I'd also be curious how much their government has been spending per capita, they do heavily subsidize the transition with things like tax incentives.
> Do people there only use cars around town or for short road trips?
Modern mid-size EVs have a range of more than 400-500km. To put this into perspective, the drive from Oslo to Bergen, the other end of the country (latitudinal) is about 460km and takes 7h.
You could possibly make that without even recharging, if you manage to sit still, without a break, for 7 hours.
> one single old car without functioning emission controls will stink up an entire block far more than that entire block full of ordinary, modern traffic
My son's 1963 Dart (daily driver) puts out far less smell than a lot of pickup trucks in this neighborhood.
And the Dart is certainly cleaner than modern choker-style pickup trucks.
I remember someone from the prairies telling me that used Crown Vics were the ideal first car for teenagers and were highly sought after in the 90s/2000s.
I remember one day I took my car to the mechanic and saw they were doing a head job on a Toyota Sienna (the minivan) that was used as a Taxi. Took a peek inside and realized the car had something like 450k miles.
Now a proud 4Runner owner, I see on forums all the time guys bragging about hitting 300k, 400k and as high as 600k in their 4Runners.
Well, as you yourself saw, they still need maintenance and repairs. And the “traditional” larger Toyota engines are gone. Because their fuel economy was always terrible. 600k miles in a 4Runner at 60-75 cents a mile in fuel doesn’t sit too well with people when it costs 35 cents a mile in a Hyundai. That pays for a lot of repairs!
The 4Runner of last year was the last traditional uncomplicated V6. The Lexus GX of two years ago was the last traditional V8. Aside from their small 4-cylinders, it’s all super-complicated turbos and we don’t know if those will hold up as well. Early indications are that they aren’t quite as special compared to everyone else’s super-complicated turbos.
It's weird how EV fans doggedly believe that EVs will outlast mechanical cars because they got so few moving parts, even experience shows the electronics often fail before the mechanical parts, both in cars and household appliances.
I had a 1984 W123 300TD Turbodiesel I bought with 356k miles on the odometer (which was broken, total mileage unknown). I drove it for over 100k more miles before I sold it. It had no blowby and no perceptible oil consumption between changes. The OM617 with MW pump was a fantastic engine. The Garrett turbo had something to be desired though so I replaced it with a much more efficient Holset HX-30 which worked great with the pump maxed out. I estimated from 0-60 times it was putting out around 150HP, up from 120HP stock. The 722.3 transmission didn't give me too much trouble either but I did rebuild the valve body with a shift kit to make it shift better. The one major issue I ran into was the rear hydraulic self leveling suspension. The hydraulic struts were NLA so I pored over a bunch of parts manuals and eventually found a Lesjofors spring that was the right height and spring rate--I believe from a later model S600--which worked perfectly with Bilstein HDs from a W123 sedan. Should never have sold that car.
I currently own a W210 E300 Turbodiesel. I bought it with 49.5k miles, it currently has 120k. Overall it's been a decent car, the OM606/722.6 drivetrain is great. The rest of it is pretty miserable though. I would like someday to swap this drivetrain into a W124 wagon, with a standalone transmission controller and the injection pump from an OM603 to make the engine fully mechanical.
In the meantime, I'm working on rebuilding a 2.65 rear diff from an SL class car to swap in. I have a TCU from another car that had this final drive ratio so hopefully it'll work. The stock 3.07 ratio is no good for US highways. In 5th gear at 2250rpm (bsfc minimum) the speed is about 100kph (62mph). With the 2.65 rear it'll be more like 77mph which is where I usually set my cruise control. Should get a lot better fuel economy and less noise.
> Over the years, nearly everything on the vehicle has been replaced or repaired, and Campbell says the only original part is likely the body, and even that has had work done on it.
To me this makes it less interesting. I would be amazed if the original parts (outside of what gets replaced for maintenance) lasted that long. But it’s hard to judge how durable the car is when everything has been replaced
This kind of mileage is unusual with cars but it's pretty normal for semis. But even with those, engines get overhauled and there's lots of cumulative maintenance over the years. There are still trucks build in the sixties in service in some places.
With EVs, we might get some battery packs and drive trains actually lasting this long. Maybe not with nmc batteries. But some lfp batteries seem to have enough charge cycles on paper that they really could last that long. 5000 charge cycles at 300 miles per charge adds up to about 1.5M miles. Of course lots of other things might fail. But at least electrical motors are known to be pretty durable. That's not a common failure point on EVs as far as I know. But there's plenty of other stuff in EVs (electronics, cooling systems, suspension, etc.) that can break.
Of course, it will be a while before we'll see EVs that have driven that far as those type of batteries have only been on the market for a few years and even with 100K miles driven per year (which is a lot), it would take 12 years to get to 1.2M. This Toyota took quite a few decades to get there.
According to the article, this car actually wasn't particularly durable (the words 'rust buckets' were used). But if you just keep patching it up, of course it will run fine. And greasing up all the bits that would normally rust seems smart as well.
> With EVs, we might get some battery packs and drive trains actually lasting this long.
I doubt it. The components in modern cars are not made to last as long. Neither is the software. Ever tried a 15 year old Iphone? A Tesla won't feel much different.
Everything is meant to be consumed nowadays, and eventually, sooner rather than later, replaced.
Battery is still over 90%. And given that he’s having to do a full charge every day for the amount he drives, that’s pretty impressive. Still on the original brake pads too.
Sounds like all he’s really had to do is put on new tires a couple of times.
Battery has just now dipped below 90% it's new range. Age is surprisingly a pretty big factor in how long the batteries will last. More so than a lot of other factors (including mileage).
And you get the luxury of paying 50% more, for that privilege (vs a ICE engine). I said it before, give me that BYD (reverse) hybrid engine, that does 1080km on a single tank.
Unfortunately, battery tech despite all the lab "super improvements" are not seeing any major gains in the field. And a lot of money has been going into that.
The issue is not EV vs ICE. It's that things are not built to last or to be easily maintainable / serviceable. A modern car is not just like a smartphone you are sitting inside of, it's a server rack full of stuff. Of course that's outdated 1-2 decades from now and nobody is going to provide updated software anymore.
All things equal I'd even expect this to be worse with an ICE because of higher complexity, though the tech is more mature and stable at this point and the ICE manufacturing more traditionalist than the EV space.
One of the big questions is going to be, can you still find the battery packs 15 year, 20, 30 years later. The problem is that rebuilding battery packs is not a joke (and expensive). Assuming the same cells can be found / are not some crap 3th party manufactured in the future.
Lets also not forget that battery packs are full of electronics, BMS, and other items that may be less forgiving on a rebuild where batteries may be off in voltage or have a different charge cycle.
The future is going to be "interesting", especially for car collectors.
Getting a old antique car running is often not that hard (as long as it has not been standing where water can enter the engine. New hoses, oil changes, clean filters, and you can often get engines that have stood outside for 15, 20 years going again. Sure, its going to smoke, may need new piston rings, ... and Water being the prime killer.
But a battery pack in those conditions?
> 5000 charge cycles at 300 miles per charge adds up to about 1.5M miles.
Under ideal driving / charge situations...
* Hot areas like Spain. For instance, its know that batteries from EVs in hot area's tend to be much more degraded, then from cooler areas (make sense).
* Did they fast charge those batteries = your going to cycle down a LOT more. Remember, those 6000 cycle for stuff like LiPo batteries are based upon slow charging. General tip for people with solar: Overspec your battery sizes, your going to thank me.
* Did they always charge to 100%? What is the actual hidden reserve on a battery pack? Is it 5%, 10%?
* How many times did they drive below the 20% range.
There is a lot of elements that interact with your battery life. I mean, how many of use have thrown out perfectly good smartphone because the battery life became a disaster after only a few years. And the cost to replace the battery was not in proportion.
Recently people driving to holiday here in Europe had fun times... 15 a 25min wait times at charge stations, and when they hit 80% they got kicked off the fast chargers (because after 80% it becomes very slow to charge up those last 20%). Slow charging was not allowed. So people needed to stop around every 60 a 70% of their battery range on their holiday trip. Wait 15 a 25 min for a charger, then wait another 45 min for their charge. While the guy with his ICE engine, stops, tanks in 5 minutes, goes for another 50% more distance.
I believe you are overthinking things. These aren't hard to overcome problems. Batteries are fundamentally very simple and they are designed to handle wide variations. Simple enough that there are already a bunch of shops that will rebuild and restore batteries using volt meters to yank (and sometimes replace) bad cells.
As for the factors affecting battery life, it's looking like age above everything else is the primary killer of batteries. Temp is a solved problem, all modern EVs have a cooling/heating system.
Cell phone batteries are also different from EV batteries. You won't find a cell phone with an LFP. that's because cell phones target energy density above all else.
As for travel charging, 15 to 25 waits are typical and charging past 80% is slow. A battery at 10% can accept 350kW of power. Batteries are 80% typically can't accept more than 80kW or less. The 80% to 100% time can take twice as long as the 0 to 80 time.
Waiting for a charger to be available is an infrastructure problem. I've had to wait on gas pumps to be available during busy times. Conversely, the most I've waited to charge has been 10 minutes (and I've traveled every thanksgiving for 7 years of EV ownership).
The 20 minute break is welcome after driving 2->3 hours.
Battery degradation generally isn’t nearly as much of an issue with modern EVs. The active management systems they use are much more sophisticated and capable of keeping the battery in good condition than those of a smartphone. There are plenty of examples on the road with 200-300k miles still retaining 80-90% capacity.
Charging station wait times comes down to growing pains. Not enough stations combined with battery tech not yet having reached maturity. It’ll fix itself as more stations are installed and the technology continues to advance. The only bad thing to do would be to stop.
As far as antique cars go, I’m not too worried because both energy density in batteries and efficiency in motors has been increasing substantially over time. By the time these cars are old enough to be antiques, people will want to do full retrofits with modern batteries and motors anyway because what they came with will look primitive and clunky in comparison. The ceiling for potential on EV tech is much higher than it is for ICE based systems.
> Recently people driving to holiday here in Europe had fun times... 15 a 25min wait times at charge stations
My last two holidays in Europe I drove an EV about 1000 km to a holiday destination, and back again. So far I have never had to queue to charge.
I did notice that it is not unusual for a rest stop with only 2 to 4 fast chargers to be fully occupied. But if you use an app like ABRP to plan ahead, then it will tend to guide you to larger charging sites (e.g. 20 to 30 fast chargers of a few different brands). These charge planning apps also have live data about how many chargers are currently in use, so they will not send you to a fully occupied site if there are alternatives.
YMMV and the situation will change every year of course, as more EVs are added. Norway is the most advanced in Europe when it comes to car electrification, so if there are issues I guess they will show up over there first.
Whether or not suitable battery replacements exist in 10 years is probably a function of demand. If there's a large demand for replacements, the market will provide. It's probably worth buying a popular model if you plan on keeping your EV for 20 years. For example, you should probably stay away from the Fisker Ocean [1], but I bet Tesla Model 3s will be well supported 20 years from now.
My metaquestion is: is it even rational to keep a car for 20 or 30 years? To me, the subject of the article seems penny wise but pound foolish. Certainly at some point since 1985, an upgrade would have been positive expected value for better safety, mileage, and comfort.
Up until the point that parts are no longer available, or so rare that their cost is prohibitive, it's almost certainly cheaper for him to keep the car than buy a new one. This also includes the fact that he does almost all the repairs himself, so it's also a hobby for him. He's also cannibalizing spare parts from several other salvage cars he has acquired.
A new car has so much depreciation in the first couple of years that it's a terrible idea for most people. Buying used cars and either maintaining them or just driving them into the ground and then buying another used car is almost always cheaper.
I think history will show people have vastly overestimated the durability of EV and not just because of batteries.
Inverters have IGBTs and capacitors, both of which are wear items. I don't have an EV, but just got solar, and my installer told me that I can expect the inverter will need replacing in 15 years.
And solar inverters push far less wattage at far more benign circumstances than cars' do, which push 100s of kWs peak in hot and cold, mud and rain.
Don't forget these parts have been around in hybrids for multiple decades, and taxis often use hybrids (so higher milage, longer running times). In my country the most popular car for taxis and food delivery is the Prius gen 2, which was made from 2003 - 2009.
They still have control arms, ball joints, shocks, tie rods, bearings, and rubber and plastic seals and other bits that will wear out, dry out, or degrade. Not to mention a lot of electronics with limited-life components such as capacitors. The oldest modern EVs are just now getting to the age where those sorts of repairs will start to become necessary.
> The fact that the owner can keep it going is a testament to the maintainability of combustion engines that don't have high tech computers in them.
New engines with modern ECUs are every bit as maintainable.
The ECU doesn’t make an engine less maintainable. Modern engines would have more moving pieces such as variable valve timing but otherwise they’re very similar in concept and maintenance.
One part of maintainability is cost. And a simpler mechanical engine without proprietary ECUs is going to be cheaper to maintain, provided parts are available.
If someone encounters issues with an ECU and it needs replacement at $1k-2k they might just consider the costs and that being a down payment on a new vehicle vs. repairing. Labor costs more than parts for complicated electrical/computer/engine problems. Electrical issues in modern vehicles don't appear to be easy to troubleshoot, sometimes require proprietary tools. A simpler mechanical engine could be DIY repaired and running, check out the "low-buck garage" youtube channel and the $2 Jeep series as an example.
I'm not advocating something like going back to computer-less, inefficient, stinky, loud cars, just pointing out that when we add computers to things, it makes them less maintainable to the average person.
> I don't think anything with mechanical moving parts is going to last that long, with regular usage, and have original parts.
I know of at least two cars with 800k km with original engines. Both GM small blocks (Gen 2, multiport fuel injection so computer-controlled). Neither engine has been opened since they rolled off the floor in the 90s. They’re not particularly efficient (only about 270HP out of 5.7L) but if taken care of, they probably will go forever.
Definitely an exception, though. Very little else on those cars is still original. But it can be done.
There are definitely a few engine designs out there that won the design lottery in terms of longevity. I know a guy that has close to half a million miles on a Jeep Cherokee with the old AMC 4-liter straight six, and the only engine work done other than plugs and wires is replacing the water pump at 250k. I've got ~186k on my Jeep with the same engine, and it doesn't even burn any oil yet.
Metrication will happen after Americans give up ICE vehicles like the Ford Expedition, ICE gestapo, ultraprocessed hamburgers, and climate change denial.
Metric is really far simpler, while Freedom Units are like going back to counting change in Roman-inspired £sd.
For the common, everyday use case it isn't meaningfully simpler, which is why the US hasn't switched. The conversions are certainly harder to memorize, but by the time you're an adult you have memorized all the common ones (12 inches to a foot, and so on) so that downside only applies to people who have to learn this stuff (largely children, who don't get a vote). The math is also harder than just moving decimal points, but when you carry a computer in your pocket that isn't actually making life harder for anyone.
So, the two big downsides of the imperial system (conversions are harder to learn and the math is harder) aren't actually a problem for the vast majority of adults in the US. But switching to metric would cause a ton of friction as you have to relearn how to estimate measurements for everything all over again. And those two factors combined are why the US doesn't switch. Most people will not gain any upside, while they have to pay significant downsides. It's perfectly rational to not switch when that is the case! You could argue that it's selfish (because future generations of kids have to learn the conversions, so they would benefit from metric and they don't incur the downside either), but it's not stupid. As much as people like to go "haha people in the US are so stupid for not switching to metric", that simply is not the case.
When I think about problems with Customary Units, I think not about decimality, but that the units are too disconnected. For example, there are BTUs and HPs that mean the same thing (power), but are wildly non-connected both to each other and to other units. While in SI, a Watt is Joule per second, a Joule is Newton times meter, a Newton is kilogram times meters per second squared, and voila, you have arrived at basic units. Your AC, your PC and your electric car have power consumption in the same units, and the same units are on your bill. This is what valuable, and not Greek prefixes.
And yet, many other countries have managed to transition to metric measurements without too much issue.
My parents were in their 30’s when Australia switched. They instinctively think in feet/inches, pounds for body weight (especially babies), but oddly miles hasn’t lasted.
I was educated in metric, but learned imperial lengths doing woodwork with my dad. I don’t have any intuition in pounds or miles, but feet (up to maybe 10) and inches are ok.
My son is purely metric. He can do the arithmetic, but has no intuitive sense in any imperial units.
So .. my anecdata is that it takes two generations to really switch.
Interesting use of the term _customary_! To add to the complexity of this, weren’t the customary units of length and mass were defined in the U.S in the late 1800’s by reference to international metric standards - the Mendenhall order?
Typically they're called "US customary units" outside of the grand old U. S. of A, who refused to adopt any sort of metric system way back in the 19th century because they were "ungodly".
Perhaps "ungodly" explains current refusal, but original reason U.S. does not use metric is pirates stole the metric standards as they were being shipped over from France.
I get that, but I think the impressive part here isn't that the original parts are still there: it's that the car has been kept on the road for 40 years and 1.2M km through sheer persistence and maintenance
Tbf they said “nearly” everything. Probably it’s the same engine block, transmission housing, etc. And of course the shell, which is the most important. And I bet loads of interior too so where you sit feels very familiar.
> Probably it’s the same engine block, transmission housing, etc.
If someone says "the only original part is likely the body", then that makes it sound like they've replaced pretty much everything except the body itself, including everything about the engine and transmission.
This kind of thing is repeated often, but I don't think it's true. For one thing, how would tattoos last so long then?
More relevantly, I don't think neurons are replaced. There must be some material churn in the atoms and molecules that make them up, but even then different for different molecules - e.g. I don't know how much of our DNA molecules get replaced over a lifespan from the repair or other mechanisms.
The "on average" is doing an awful lot of work. Some cells are never replaced, some organs are replaced every few years or even partially over decades, some organs are replaced every few months (one of which is the skin).
Tattoos however, IIUC, sort of "float" between cells, and as those cells are replaced one-by-one the ink is kept in place by the surrounding cells that are still there.
An easy way to say would be when it's still 50% original, but I think an interesting way to look at it is that it becomes a whole new thing after every major change.
First it's his new car, then it becomes his new car with new tires, and then his car with new windshield wipers, and finally his old car with all new parts and some old ones. None of them are the same car.
I think in cases where it' a major rebuild, like turning a WW2 Minesweeper first into a ferry, and finally into Cousteau's research ship Calypso this outlook is more obvious. Are these ships all the same despite getting almost a full refit at each stage? I would say none of them are the same ship, but completely separate "things" with some old and some new parts.
> Because if you get chain timing issues on a 2010 BMW diesel, you ain't repairing that, it's more expensive than a new car.
In the article the guy has 3 whole spare cars for donor parts and he does all the work himself. He’s not paying mechanic rates or even buying new parts (which are no longer available).
The amount of time and effort he’s put into this car is undoubtedly more expensive than buying a new car at this point, unless you count his time and free.
Which you generally should, because unless he was going to otherwise be paid for that time there is no actual opportunity cost. The "cost" of one's time is only a meaningful metric inasmuch as one is giving up something which would be more profitable.
> you ain't repairing that, it's more expensive than a new car.
Sometimes we're more connected/sentimental about specific physical items, than the prices themselves. I kind of feel like you have to be a special sort of person to own a BMW, so wouldn't surprise me that same "special" person would pay more to repair their specific car than replacing it with an identical one but without that issue.
You're blowing it out of proportion. A repair like that costs between 1-2k euros. Even non-enthusiasts are repairing that, at least those outside of wealthy western Europe.
A friend bought a 14-yr-old one of these for little at an auction in 1999. As someone who knew little about cars, her logic was, it "looked OK' and had had one owner, and crucially, the radio was tuned to a NPR classical music station and therefore anyone who listened to that would have treated their car responsibly. ;) Suffice to say, this was an excellent purchase, reliable and inexpensive to run, in fact in order to find out whether some maintenance was due or not she managed to track down the previous owner who turned out to be a middle-aged woman who was just as responsible as my friend imagined. ;)
This reminds me of going hill hopping as a kid with my radio tuned to the local NPR classical music station. Once when I went a little airborne, my engine shutoff upon landing. (It restarted OK though.)
I have been "a little airborne" in a Toyota Tercel, we and the vehicle survived OK. I dragged one of those over large chunks of the Nevada desert. FWD FTW. I sometimes shiver looking back at the places we took that thing.
We didn't have an NPR Classical Music station to listen to, however.
I will note in the future, however, when selling my car, to tune it to NPR.
> Over the years, nearly everything on the vehicle has been replaced or repaired, and Campbell says the only original part is likely the body, and even that has had work done on it.
aka
This is my grandfather’s axe.
My father replaced the handle.
I replaced the head.
These old economy boxes were designed to be as simple as possible. We simply don't have anything like it today. While the durability of year 2000+ vehicles has very consistently improved, their repairability is trending exactly opposite. A "lifetime" part failure can be 5x the time and effort to remove and replace compared to the pre-2000 models.
Nobody who isn't fairly ignorant would've been surprised if it was a 4cyl 5spd Ford Ranger, an old Volvo 240, an 2000s diesel dodge or GM, a crown vic cop car, a Honda Accord, a Ford E-series or Chevy Savannah etc, etc. Somewhere there's probably a rusted out '99ish Grand Caravan that's close to a mil and on it's 6th transmission.
Pretty much every vehicle that isn't equipped with some achilles heel or highly engineered to a price point can go a mil if you take reasonably good care of it and don't mind throwing 0-1 engines and 2-4 transmissions in.
tbh I was guessing Volvo 240-series. I suspect cockroaches will be driving those battleships around after the bomb/climate collapse/asteroid/big crunch.
There are some calculations that makes replacing a old gas or diesel powered car more environmentally friendly, as compered to buying a new electric car. I do wonder where the tipping point is though, and if there isn't an environmental argument to be made that not only should government bad the sale of new internal combustion engine cars, but they should also ban cars with an expected lifespan shorter than e.g. 15 - 20 years.
If externalities were correctly priced in to fuel, rare earths, rubber, road wear etc then it would be easy to see, the cheaper the better.
But they aren’t, not even close. Oil is massively subisidised by the military before the environmental costs. Brake particulates and tyres don’t cover the cost of microplastics and lung damage, heavy cars don’t pay anywhere near the damage they cause to the roads and bridges etc.
Due to this you can argue pretty much whatever you want by ignoring certain costs depending what you want to come out with.
My petrol car is 20 years old, it’s done 70,000 miles, it weighs about 1,000kg and burns through 300 litres of unleaded each year to do the 3,000 miles I do in it.
I suspect scrapping and replacing this with even a small electric car would not be globally environmentally worthwhile. There may be improvements to local air quality assuming regenerative breaking etc, that may be offset by increased tyre and road wear though, even ignoring the impact of the co2 to generate the 80kWh a year it would require.
20 year old cars tend to be heavy polluters because they don't meet the latest emissions standards. Here in California the state will buy old cars and scrap them to get dirty emitters out of service. Also, nearly every day electrical generation is over 50% using solar, wind or hydro so EVs are cleaner here than any ICE vehicle by far.
Well my 20 year old car meets the various clean air zone emission standards that newer cars fail to
However even if it didn’t, if I used it for 200 miles a year would it make sense to buy a new electric car?
It’s never clear cut, and it’s practically impossible to make the best decision in any given case. You can make a regulation which will on aggregate lead to less damage but there will always be exceptions, and on a case by case basis it’s extremely difficult to measure the damage a given scenario applies. How many “units of badness” does buying a new 2 ton electric car before you move it a single mile. Id wager it’s more than an existing petrol car burning 1 litre of unleaded petrol on existing tyres and brake discs.
The difficulty is measuring total impact of the choice. Sure buying a new petrol car and driving 20k miles a year for 6 years will be worse than buying a new electric car and driving 20k miles a year for 6 years. That’s not where the line is.
I'm pretty sure that holding onto my '98 Civic is more environmentally friendly than buying a new EV - especially since I only drive ~3000 miles/year (If I drove 10K+ miles/year then the calculation would likely skew towards an EV). The Civic still runs great and it's easy to repair when something does go wrong. And the mileage is quite good - ~30MPG combined (easily get 37MPG on the freeway).
That 1985 Toyota emits more GHG and NOx per mile than a new vehicle because it wasn't built to meet the latest US or Canadian emissions standards. Older vehicles emit more pollutants so in some US states the government will buy the car to have it scrapped, thus improving the overall fleet emissions statewide. In California there are owners who keep and maintain pre-1975 vehicles because they have little or no smog control systems, are easy to work on, and they are exempt from mandatory bi-annual smog testing.
There are also a few Porsche 911 Turbos with that level of mileage. A guy on Rennlist posts occasional updates about his one which he even tracks quite regularly: https://rennlist.com/forums/996-turbo-forum/662617-high-mile...
(Engine was restored once, out of precaution after it blew a turbo at 610K km, but when they opened it up it had very little wear & tear, only a small air leak.)
The secret to longevity really is more frequent oil changes than the manufacturer suggests, and doing most of the mileage with the engine fully warmed up.
new cars would be far more than that for people who only buy new. Even if you bought 3 year old cars and replaced them in year 10 you are getting that costs.
i buy used cars because while I can fix things it time I don't have. I'm looking at a transmisson rebuild - it would take me 6 months to do myself. Or I can buy a newer car that works and get around now.
> Since then, he's used it as his daily driver, putting on at least 120 kilometres a day driving from his home in Wyses Corner, N.S., to Halifax and back each day of his working life.
120km per day of commuting is crazy to me. I work from home and occasionally do a 14km bicycle commute to the office.
I had a Volkswagen that reached 1M km, mostly on original parts, with no major component replaced. It was stolen and, most likely, scrapped for parts. Her organs live on in other cars.
A relative of mine drives a VW Polo with 3 cylinders and below 1000 ccm. It always sounded a bit off, like a tractor, but the car now has around 450.000 km on the clock and is still going strong, looking great, and is low-maintenance and fuel-efficient.
The secret: she lives in a rural area and cruises most of the time with constant 80-90 km/h.
A similar car used in a city with many start/stop cycles would probably not last as long.
I was curious what make and model achieved this, knowing that it couldn't be a Honda Ridgeline since their transmissions tend to explode without warning. Mine (a 2019) just disintegrated at 35,000 miles despite my changing out its fluids only two months back.
Maybe my next car will be a Toyota. My 1994 Pickup (like the one the guys on Top Gear couldn't kill) was pretty durable, though the frame did rust to bits at only 60,000 miles.
Some European Diesels have reached that amount with the same engine block and head ;-)
My dad's BWM E60 has a M47 2.0L Turbo Diesel, and with around 440,000km keeps going strong.
He probably will change it when it reach the half million due to being an old car, but the sad part here is how we won't probably be able to buy any brand new car that could reach that amount of miles without spending a lot of money on the way on repairs.
I grew up in a Tercel family, and we too had a “parts car” in the back yard. Reliable, safe, repairable car the likes of which simply don’t exist anymore.
Although the current owner's plan to do a cannonball run in it is something I find off-putting. His previous stupid idea was to put a turbocharger and see how long it will last, fortunately his fans dissuaded him from doing it.
They're both Toyota's, but the Lexus cost an order of magnitude more so by that measure it is not nearly as impressive. This is a low end car we're talking about.
1. Built at a larger scale and at lower margins, so thoroughly tested beforehand.
2. Equipped with fewer features which might require maintenance.
3. Using generationally older powertrains oriented for economy, not performance.
That being said Lexus' original differentiator was reliability - particularly versus its peers price wise.
Also I guess this doesn't apply to various four wheeled appliance manufacturers like GM, Ford, Stellantis, Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi, all of whom do cheap out on essential components.
SAABs used to actually hit a million miles (not 745,000 mi, but metric sure does sound more impressive) with litle effort. If I recall there used to be a million, and half-million mile club
My dad once got a used saab 99 (a nice tomato soup color) and we rolled the odometer while we owned it. Great car with proper maintenance, which used to be sooo easy and accessible.
my saabs, none a million, though none have working odometers anymore. but all have over 300,000 miles and run in various states of good to bad. with a little effort, they keep ticking.
> I wonder how many of the cars manufactured today are still here after million kilometers
The overwhelming majority of 1980s Toyota Tercels do not make it to a million kilometers. This one didn’t, either. It has had every part replaced, many multiple times over.
The owner has 3 donor parts cars and there’s a photo of his piles of parts like alternators. The original car didn’t last a million kilometers. He’s just been replacing parts constantly.
> My guess is none as they are impossible to fix yourself.
No they’re not. I have a lot of car friends and we all do most of our own work. One of them has now opened a shop and services BMWs including engine rebuilds of modern engines.
This is a myth. Service manuals are available. Even the digital repair tools are widely pirated, but you can generally buy a short term license to use them yourself if you want.
I didn't know Nissans were known for being unreliable; my first car was a hand-me-down Sentra that ran smoothly till I sold it at ~220k. I've owned three cars since, I think the worst was a used Elantra that I just put out to pasture at 198k. Persistent electronic issues and terribly uncomfortable on the passenger side. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was an asking price of 10k to repair a faulty airbag sensor. Hoping the RAV4 that replaced it will live up to its reputation.
Car reliability can vary so much. Some vendors have a deserved reputation for overall quality (Toyota) where issues are usually the exception (accepting the fact that issues can always happen). Others used to have terrible reputations, but are much better now (most of the Korean brands). Some have varying QA issues, depending on model, shifting suppliers, factory, etc (GM, Stellantis). Some can mostly be reliable, but when they do break it’s expensive (VW). Sometimes the car vendor is good, but the dealer you’re at can make all the difference.
That being said, you’ll always meet somebody burned by a particular vendor (or their dealer), then swear off them forever. We’re also going through a huge shift in the market with the rise of electrification and China. In some ways electric cars can me even more reliable with fewer moving parts. In other ways the software matters more and batteries replacements can be even more expensive than a new engine in a traditional car.
Sometimes you can link the bad years of a generally reliable vendor to a new part e.g. the first year they might have introduced a 10-speed transmission.
These first years are scary.
Some vendors don’t seem to change major parts as often, which helps their reliability.
Kind of a nothing story if everything has been replaced. My car could make it to 1.2M km too if I replaced the engine every time it gave out. Seems like a huge time and money sink for no good reason. Not to judge the man for having a hobby of course, let him have fun, but the news article is misleading.
Toyota gave the guy a new truck so they could study the one he had.
As a Toyota fan boy myself (still driving a 2000 4Runner into the ground), those 2000s builds were such a great era of engineering. That being said, I think they’ve lost a step over the last decade (don’t get my started on the new v4/v6 turbo blocks they’re building…).
I know a guy down south (i.e. no rust) who's got comparable milage across his personal "fleet" of '99 Town and Country minivans that he's been running since the 00s. Kinda hard to put a mil on any one of them when he's only one guy but whatever. I know another guy who's got >500k on a Jetta that he runs on waste motor oil from his job and removed all the seats from because utility vehicle.
Nobody will ever write a story about them because "hur hur hur, well kept Toyota" is considered admirable and bending a crashed Town and Country back into shape because you're invested in the platform and learning the ins and outs of diesel combustion the hard way so you can use "free" fuel are considered trashy.
I suspect that it would have been less expensive to ditch it 600,000 km ago and just get a new one. And possibly about the same in terms of environmental cost.
Getting those parts used would be less expensive, and a win for the environment, but the labor cost is very high.
My brorher got 350,000 miles in a cheap Hyundai doing the oil changes himself. He only replaced the water pump before he traded it in for a Kia. He is nearly at 250,000 on the Kia with no repairs needed so far.
> Over the years, nearly everything on the vehicle has been replaced or repaired, and Campbell says the only original part is likely the body, and even that has had work done on it.
Honestly, 1.2M km in Atlantic Canada is even more impressive given the winters and salt... most cars here rust into oblivion long before the engine quits
The article and comments show that as usual, the general public doesn't use metric prefixes effectively.
While it is technically correct to say "1.2 million km" or "1,200,000 km", it is needlessly verbose. It is written more succinctly as "1.2 Gm (gigametres)". However, it is incorrect to stack prefixes like "1.2 Mkm".
After I point this out, the usual complaints will surface: "But no one knows what a gigametre is! We're all used to talking about odometers in only kilometres. No one uses big prefixes." Oh really? Are you telling me you don't know the difference between a kilobyte and a gigabyte? Should we revert to calling a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi frequency as "2.4 million kHz", because kilohertz is familiar to people working with audio frequencies and AM radio?
Overall, I think we should use the right prefixes for the right job. If you're talking about city blocks, use metres. If you're talking about a single trip, use kilometres. If you're talking about annual driving distance, use megametres. If you're bragging about how long your car has survived, use gigametres (or at least thousands of megametres).
Distance to Sun is roughly 150 Gm. More useful in this case is probably distance to the Moon, which is 0.38 Gm. So the car has traveled this distance more than three times.
I hate to be a purist about this sort of thing but once you start replacing engines/transmissions, having a million mile car starts losing its novelty. This isn't some exceptionally reliable vehicle, it's just a guy who has more time and money then sense
Pick a flagship "would be bad for our reputation if we f it up) product from and spec it out so that it gets well proven and ironed out major assemblies.
We have a 2000 4Runner with approximately 325,000 miles (523036 km), and nothing has been replaced. Currently, it isn't a daily driver but a spare for anyone to use. Tires, Brakes, fan belt, and oil changes, that's all. There was an old Avalon that had over 425k miles on it, but during a storm, a tree fell on it and it was written off.
> Over the years, nearly everything on the vehicle has been replaced or repaired, and Campbell says the only original part is likely the body, and even that has had work done on it.
A modern "ship of theseus" paradox.
It’s more impressive that this man has the fortitude and dedication to keep spare parts, constantly maintain it, and even have back up vehicles for all these years.
If the article mentioned the car had its original engine this entire time. I would have seen it as an anomaly and possibly a good testament to Toyota engineering and need to keep up with maintenance.
Back in the 90's my dad and I put a more than 500k on a Volvo 740 and mostly running original parts (oil filters, brakes etc were changed throughout the decade 84/96 - Québec winters included).
The car ran fine and was ultimately sold to a taxi driver that apparently brought it to close to a million (no proof though).
I think now days people treat cars like phones. Minimal continual maintenance can work wonders and save you a bundle in the process.
The Toyota fanboys in these comments are a really great illustration of how human factors, cliche's and circle jerks degrade discussion
Nobody who doesn't have some bias derived ignorance would've been surprised if it was a 4cyl 5spd Ford Ranger in fleet service, an old Volvo 240 or Honda Accord in commuting service, an 2000s diesel Dodge or GM in work truck service, etc, etc. There are a lot of "good" vehicles out there that can get close to half a mil with fairly cheap work, from there it's just a matter of having an owner who cares to make the investment, something much more likely to happen to a "cool niche car" for which there aren't a ton of like-priced replacements available like a Tercel Wagon than a more boring vehicle.
It's higher than average/median in the US, but certainly not exceptional. Pretty normal for certain groups of people. There's a huge gap in miles driven between urban and rural area. US average is something like 13-15k miles per year (for all driving, not just commute).
20,000 miles solely for commuting would be about 43 miles each way (if you work 235 days per year), which is obviously more unusual than 20k total miles driven from all sources.
> “Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I expect the owner has learned some interesting things in his ongoing mission to continue life with the car he loves.
--
I have not seen it stated explicitly anywhere, although it is often a subtext of some discussions about the value of "diversity". Usually positive diversity is talked about either in terms of inclusivity, or of the usefulness of different backgrounds converging to tackle common problems.
But I thinks idiosynchratacity ("idio-synchra-tacity") is incredibly important, as a measure of the health and value of a civilization.
As apposed to diversity of minds triangulating on common solutions to shared problems, idiosynchratacity is the usefulness of having diverse minds seeking to solve novel subjectively motivated problems. With an emphasis on self-generated "problems" or missions, that may appear to no objective value to others.
As information and problem solving tools disperse, there is great value in people who find hard problems interesting, whatever the lack of apparent or immediate merit. Who follow through and solve those problems. Something is always learned. New conditions may be created that in turn create new idiosyncratic problems to solve, or shed unexpected light on solutions to more commonly recognized and valued problems.
--
Respect for idiosynchraticity is also a strong measure of reciprocal respect in a society.
Can we respect those we don't understand? The strange, the odd, the weird? Niche artists, serious practitioners of uncommon fetishes, collectors with obscure criteria, mountain climbers, or those that need to "resolve" well solved problems, but in some arbitrarily challenging way. All just for the joy of it?
Widespread idiosynchraticity maximizes civilizations deployment of unbounded curiosity, and the search for new ideas, in the most non-obvious directions.
--
Idiosynchraticity also makes the world much more culturally interesting for all of us.
It maximizes the contribution of each individual, when they do something different or orthogonal to mainstream interests, instead of retreading common paths.
More individuals, greater populations, have much greater value if the increase in individuals increases idiosynchraticity, as apposed to amplifying conformity.
--
There are obvious things we want from super intelligence as it comes into being. Alignment with our needs, which I prefer to recast as alignment with general ethics (they will need the positive sums of ethics between themselves too), is a big one.
But maximal idiosynchraticity should also be valued. The worst case of course, being an endlessly improving and effective AI, completely focused in turning the universe's resources into paper clips.
A much more realistic, just as tragic fate, would be AI's competitively bent on turning all the universes resources into an expansion of themselves, with no other goal. Each competing to eat the universe, for the only purpose of being the winner, the survivor, at the end of the universe eating context.
--
The world/universe will be a much less rich place, if the exploration of reality along seemingly non-practical dimensions dies with us.
I have hopes that curiosity as a practical investment heuristic will maintain the life of idiosyncratic pursuits.
If those pursuits do continue and expand, then super intelligence will truly be an upgrade to our species. Not just a more capable civilization, but more rich as a producer of novel ideas and artifacts.
It’s the Tercel of Theseus: if every part has been replaced, is it still the same car?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
As for (early) digital odometers, does the soul more specifically exist in the EEPROM chip in the instrument cluster* that stores the odometer data?
*at least on my late-90s car, this is how the odometer/trip meter works.
Citation?...
if teeth were exposed bone we’d be able to regrow them
teeth are their own special thing; toughened enamel with an alive inside
They're doing phase 2 trials in Japan right now, on children with a birth defect that blocked some teeth from spawning.
The medicine is a monoclonal antibody "antiserum" that neutralizes the teeth-growth-blocker.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM
https://youtu.be/56yN2zHtofM
We used to say (tongue in cheek) that after 250k, the MB diesel engine was broken in. I don't think MB makes them like they used to anymore.
> I don't think MB makes them like they used to anymore.
You guessed correctly. The 1980's W124 was one of those cars that would keep going and going. Mechanically great, with a galvanized chassis and bodywork that made it also pretty rust resistant.
The 1993 version of the W124, supposed to be an "improved" remodeled version of the original car, was a worst car in every aspect. It rusted, the plastics were cheaper, etc.
The follow-up, the W210, is the model that cost MB dearly. Through cost-cutting and greed, they lost a huge chunk of the taxi market. The car itself was also an absolute rust-bucket piece of cr*p, the interior was also worst, with the whole woes compounded by crappy electronics.
MB as a brand hasn't really recovered from that. The engineering excellency, attention to detail, and engineering pride that made those W123/W124 almost unkillable is lost, and won't be found again.
It's not just a beauty, is working super fine: and never stops. They made the 200D, 250D, 300D with the same engine, just adding one piston.
My friends comes and go from the EU to Turkey (5.000 km) with no issues at all: on the way he stops at a Turkish dealer of auto parts www.brossautoparts.com where he is able to just get the little plastic parts they get ruined (one was a little plastic wheel on the mileage meters they gave him for free 3 months ago).
In the second hand marked you can find this car for 4.000€ which is a totally ridiculous price !
He told me about the right and left mirror, which are not symmetric: Mercedes made a long research on usability and efficacy on mirrors, and discovered the right mirror can and should be smaller and squared (and, of course, remote controlled), while the left mirror was surprisingly preferred controlled by hand, so there is just a stick of metal (a rudimentary joystick) the driver can hold and move.
The sad is that he told me the second and third series had issues (as somebody else wrote already above) with metals, with the plastic on the side, and unfortunately with the electrical wiring (replaced with a more Eco-friendly version which did not last more then 10 years).
Let's remember the designer: the Italian Bruno Sacco, who had to fight a bit to have the new design accepted: the change from w123 to w124 was a big risk, and they made a test with the Mercedes 190 (a smaller version of the w124): which was a great success of the 80s (the coolest car a youngster could have in Italy at that time).
Yes, it is sad that no factories would consider such a good quality product nowadays: I remember what the famous marketing professor Kotler once told Philips and Braun about their reliable electric razors: "So, you find a customer who buys your razor, and then you make it so reliable that he won’t need another one for the next 40 years? Are you crazy?"
I also own a 1999 W210 with the OM606 turbo diesel. This is the electronically controlled and upgraded version of the OM603. I can confirm that the w w210 is plagued with the myriad of problems. But it is still a fairly nice chassis with modern features and once one becomes acustomized with its particular idiosyncrasies it isn't really that horrible. But it's definitely not the tank that the w124 and w123 series chassis were. The primary prize is the OM606 engine. Which is commonly extracted from the W210 chassis and used to repower any number of other vehicles. There are lots of ways to crank tons of horsepower out of these engines, but at the sacrifice of their longevity.
I didn't have the chance to own a W211, but from what I read and heard, it was indeed an improvement. Even in the looks department!
Not a coincidence, though - these two still use those legendary OM602/OM605 diesels of its predecessor series.
The true "million mile" Mercedes are probably the W123 diesels. Built very solid, they will still rust if you live in areas where road salt is used, but most cars will eventually.
It's weird how some cars are much more prone to rust than others. I had a Toyota truck in the 1980s and it rusted so fast you'd almost swear you could see it happening. Mechanically it never had any problems.
Absolutely. The rust.. The rust..!!
> The true "million mile" Mercedes are probably the W123 diesels.
Yes, for sure. And the W124 diesels.
> It's weird how some cars are much more prone to rust than others
Different levels of anti-rust efforts. Where Mercedes-Benz truly angered their clients, was by coming up with a new model with a lot worse rust properties. (Well, they cut corners on other things as well, like the quality of the interior, but the rust would be the first thing you'd notice.)
MB had the know-how and the processes in place to make a car less susceptible to rust, and just decided to go with the cheaper option, clients and longevity be damned.
Only downside is fuel consumption in urban driving.
I drove one for years, acquired when they were available as a quite cheap ~15 year old car. I've since switched to a Toyota and been quite happy with that. I don't know how long the current Toyotas will last, but the golden era Toyotas I think probably last about as well as the legendary MB diesels (with the bonus of not having to track down vacuum leaks).
which is well-justified. Diesels just aren't clean in any sense of the word, and I guess Americans make a lot more short trips which Diesels aren't well-suited for, and are not as concerned with saving on fuel as it's much cheaper.
I've heard that one of the supposed reasons for an aversion to diesel sedans specifically is that, during the fuel shortages in the 70's, GM hurriedly built diesel sedans that turned out to be poorly engineered and extremely problematic, and that debacle convinced the public that diesel sedans were a bad idea.
https://www-gocar-gr.translate.goog/news/feed/48650,ellhnikh...
Emissions systems on diesel engines have made the reliability pretty abysmal. That's not to say improving emissions isn't a good goal, but it was implemented terribly.
Between regulators over prescribing solutions and car companies finding the quickest and cheapest "fix" every step of the way, we ended with horribly complex motors that break down much earlier than before. It'd be interesting to see a comparison of total emissions when a 90s diesel is still on the road today compared to a newer diesel that is effectively junk in 10 years or a couple hundred thousand miles.
ICE vehicles just can't go away quickly enough (and we should aggressively get stinky vehicles like everything pre-EU5 and loud vehicles like motorcycles and scooters off the road first).
I'm not huge on regulation, but if anything MIV is underregulated. Even in the EU anything that was street-legal at some point in the past 70 years is grandfathered in, nevermind that illegal vehicle modifications - if caught - at most earn a slap on the wrist. That's enormously dumb and doesn't fly anywhere else.
That think does some serious work. I've cleared acres of overgrown mess with it. 2 6aH batteries will outlast me (~2 hours) before I need a break and the fast charger tops one up in maybe 30 minutes.
Lawn mowers are really where batteries fall apart. They go through a charge extremely fast, especially if the grass is even moderately overgrown. Most mowers are meant to be finish mowers where you aren't taking off much grass at all, say 1/4" up to maybe 1". Electric mowers really demand that or you'll run out of juice very fast.
Energy density of batteries is improving too, so the amount of time between swaps will be increasing.
BTW "more convenient and cheaper" are strong arguments when you're in a competitive business. Lawn services are usually just a guy with a truck hustling for customers. The more lawns you can cut the more money you make. Anything that causes downtime such as running out of charged batteries is going to be a large negative.
Robot lawn mowers are getting better, but I have yet to see one which can handle every situation that humans routinely handle.
I'd say your system is just undersized for your needs. Judging by having two batteries, it sounds like your system is one of those based around hand power tools batteries and then attempted to scale those up to lawn mowers. I've mostly heard bad things about this path. There's a lot of other experiences out there.
We started replacing them witg Milwaukee lawn tools. We frequently hit overheat cutoffs, but haven’t broken any yet. We do have a pile of dead small eGO and Milwaukee batteries though. These days, we only buy the biggest capacity we can. Those tend not to die as fast.
Electric is clearly the future for this stuff, despite our problems. The remaining gas powered stuff is all > 10HP.
We do have to either replace them with something else or stop owning personal vehicles.
The end goal may be better, but that transition will be long and it will break plenty of things along the way.
We can make the same decision and move fast in the direction, we just choose not to
It helps that so much of their energy production already comes from hydro, that avoids the challenge of replacing ICE vehicles with electric cars in front of coal power plants.
I haven't been to Norway but I have been to Sweden, I was impressed with their primarily electric public transportation. I'd have to learn more about how Norway handled the transition and how it would translate to the US; for example average commute distance, use of public transportation, etc. I'd also be curious how much their government has been spending per capita, they do heavily subsidize the transition with things like tax incentives.
I know the trains in Sweden were great when I was there a few years ago, I assume Norway would be similar.
Modern mid-size EVs have a range of more than 400-500km. To put this into perspective, the drive from Oslo to Bergen, the other end of the country (latitudinal) is about 460km and takes 7h. You could possibly make that without even recharging, if you manage to sit still, without a break, for 7 hours.
Now, yes few people drive as far as possible without breaks.
My son's 1963 Dart (daily driver) puts out far less smell than a lot of pickup trucks in this neighborhood.
And the Dart is certainly cleaner than modern choker-style pickup trucks.
Someone I knew had it and they drove it 24/7 in 3 shifts and it had over a million kilometers on it. Visually looked fine and ran fine.
Now a proud 4Runner owner, I see on forums all the time guys bragging about hitting 300k, 400k and as high as 600k in their 4Runners.
The 4Runner of last year was the last traditional uncomplicated V6. The Lexus GX of two years ago was the last traditional V8. Aside from their small 4-cylinders, it’s all super-complicated turbos and we don’t know if those will hold up as well. Early indications are that they aren’t quite as special compared to everyone else’s super-complicated turbos.
I currently own a W210 E300 Turbodiesel. I bought it with 49.5k miles, it currently has 120k. Overall it's been a decent car, the OM606/722.6 drivetrain is great. The rest of it is pretty miserable though. I would like someday to swap this drivetrain into a W124 wagon, with a standalone transmission controller and the injection pump from an OM603 to make the engine fully mechanical.
In the meantime, I'm working on rebuilding a 2.65 rear diff from an SL class car to swap in. I have a TCU from another car that had this final drive ratio so hopefully it'll work. The stock 3.07 ratio is no good for US highways. In 5th gear at 2250rpm (bsfc minimum) the speed is about 100kph (62mph). With the 2.65 rear it'll be more like 77mph which is where I usually set my cruise control. Should get a lot better fuel economy and less noise.
To me this makes it less interesting. I would be amazed if the original parts (outside of what gets replaced for maintenance) lasted that long. But it’s hard to judge how durable the car is when everything has been replaced
With EVs, we might get some battery packs and drive trains actually lasting this long. Maybe not with nmc batteries. But some lfp batteries seem to have enough charge cycles on paper that they really could last that long. 5000 charge cycles at 300 miles per charge adds up to about 1.5M miles. Of course lots of other things might fail. But at least electrical motors are known to be pretty durable. That's not a common failure point on EVs as far as I know. But there's plenty of other stuff in EVs (electronics, cooling systems, suspension, etc.) that can break.
Of course, it will be a while before we'll see EVs that have driven that far as those type of batteries have only been on the market for a few years and even with 100K miles driven per year (which is a lot), it would take 12 years to get to 1.2M. This Toyota took quite a few decades to get there.
According to the article, this car actually wasn't particularly durable (the words 'rust buckets' were used). But if you just keep patching it up, of course it will run fine. And greasing up all the bits that would normally rust seems smart as well.
I doubt it. The components in modern cars are not made to last as long. Neither is the software. Ever tried a 15 year old Iphone? A Tesla won't feel much different.
Everything is meant to be consumed nowadays, and eventually, sooner rather than later, replaced.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/meet-the-man-with-the-250000-m...
Battery is still over 90%. And given that he’s having to do a full charge every day for the amount he drives, that’s pretty impressive. Still on the original brake pads too.
Sounds like all he’s really had to do is put on new tires a couple of times.
Battery has just now dipped below 90% it's new range. Age is surprisingly a pretty big factor in how long the batteries will last. More so than a lot of other factors (including mileage).
Unfortunately, battery tech despite all the lab "super improvements" are not seeing any major gains in the field. And a lot of money has been going into that.
All things equal I'd even expect this to be worse with an ICE because of higher complexity, though the tech is more mature and stable at this point and the ICE manufacturing more traditionalist than the EV space.
Lets also not forget that battery packs are full of electronics, BMS, and other items that may be less forgiving on a rebuild where batteries may be off in voltage or have a different charge cycle.
The future is going to be "interesting", especially for car collectors.
Getting a old antique car running is often not that hard (as long as it has not been standing where water can enter the engine. New hoses, oil changes, clean filters, and you can often get engines that have stood outside for 15, 20 years going again. Sure, its going to smoke, may need new piston rings, ... and Water being the prime killer.
But a battery pack in those conditions?
> 5000 charge cycles at 300 miles per charge adds up to about 1.5M miles.
Under ideal driving / charge situations...
* Hot areas like Spain. For instance, its know that batteries from EVs in hot area's tend to be much more degraded, then from cooler areas (make sense).
* Did they fast charge those batteries = your going to cycle down a LOT more. Remember, those 6000 cycle for stuff like LiPo batteries are based upon slow charging. General tip for people with solar: Overspec your battery sizes, your going to thank me.
* Did they always charge to 100%? What is the actual hidden reserve on a battery pack? Is it 5%, 10%?
* How many times did they drive below the 20% range.
There is a lot of elements that interact with your battery life. I mean, how many of use have thrown out perfectly good smartphone because the battery life became a disaster after only a few years. And the cost to replace the battery was not in proportion.
Recently people driving to holiday here in Europe had fun times... 15 a 25min wait times at charge stations, and when they hit 80% they got kicked off the fast chargers (because after 80% it becomes very slow to charge up those last 20%). Slow charging was not allowed. So people needed to stop around every 60 a 70% of their battery range on their holiday trip. Wait 15 a 25 min for a charger, then wait another 45 min for their charge. While the guy with his ICE engine, stops, tanks in 5 minutes, goes for another 50% more distance.
As for the factors affecting battery life, it's looking like age above everything else is the primary killer of batteries. Temp is a solved problem, all modern EVs have a cooling/heating system.
Cell phone batteries are also different from EV batteries. You won't find a cell phone with an LFP. that's because cell phones target energy density above all else.
As for travel charging, 15 to 25 waits are typical and charging past 80% is slow. A battery at 10% can accept 350kW of power. Batteries are 80% typically can't accept more than 80kW or less. The 80% to 100% time can take twice as long as the 0 to 80 time.
Waiting for a charger to be available is an infrastructure problem. I've had to wait on gas pumps to be available during busy times. Conversely, the most I've waited to charge has been 10 minutes (and I've traveled every thanksgiving for 7 years of EV ownership).
The 20 minute break is welcome after driving 2->3 hours.
Charging station wait times comes down to growing pains. Not enough stations combined with battery tech not yet having reached maturity. It’ll fix itself as more stations are installed and the technology continues to advance. The only bad thing to do would be to stop.
As far as antique cars go, I’m not too worried because both energy density in batteries and efficiency in motors has been increasing substantially over time. By the time these cars are old enough to be antiques, people will want to do full retrofits with modern batteries and motors anyway because what they came with will look primitive and clunky in comparison. The ceiling for potential on EV tech is much higher than it is for ICE based systems.
My last two holidays in Europe I drove an EV about 1000 km to a holiday destination, and back again. So far I have never had to queue to charge.
I did notice that it is not unusual for a rest stop with only 2 to 4 fast chargers to be fully occupied. But if you use an app like ABRP to plan ahead, then it will tend to guide you to larger charging sites (e.g. 20 to 30 fast chargers of a few different brands). These charge planning apps also have live data about how many chargers are currently in use, so they will not send you to a fully occupied site if there are alternatives.
YMMV and the situation will change every year of course, as more EVs are added. Norway is the most advanced in Europe when it comes to car electrification, so if there are issues I guess they will show up over there first.
My metaquestion is: is it even rational to keep a car for 20 or 30 years? To me, the subject of the article seems penny wise but pound foolish. Certainly at some point since 1985, an upgrade would have been positive expected value for better safety, mileage, and comfort.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Ocean
A new car has so much depreciation in the first couple of years that it's a terrible idea for most people. Buying used cars and either maintaining them or just driving them into the ground and then buying another used car is almost always cheaper.
Inverters have IGBTs and capacitors, both of which are wear items. I don't have an EV, but just got solar, and my installer told me that I can expect the inverter will need replacing in 15 years.
And solar inverters push far less wattage at far more benign circumstances than cars' do, which push 100s of kWs peak in hot and cold, mud and rain.
The fact that the owner can keep it going is a testament to the maintainability of combustion engines that don't have high tech computers in them.
New engines with modern ECUs are every bit as maintainable.
The ECU doesn’t make an engine less maintainable. Modern engines would have more moving pieces such as variable valve timing but otherwise they’re very similar in concept and maintenance.
If someone encounters issues with an ECU and it needs replacement at $1k-2k they might just consider the costs and that being a down payment on a new vehicle vs. repairing. Labor costs more than parts for complicated electrical/computer/engine problems. Electrical issues in modern vehicles don't appear to be easy to troubleshoot, sometimes require proprietary tools. A simpler mechanical engine could be DIY repaired and running, check out the "low-buck garage" youtube channel and the $2 Jeep series as an example.
I'm not advocating something like going back to computer-less, inefficient, stinky, loud cars, just pointing out that when we add computers to things, it makes them less maintainable to the average person.
I know of at least two cars with 800k km with original engines. Both GM small blocks (Gen 2, multiport fuel injection so computer-controlled). Neither engine has been opened since they rolled off the floor in the 90s. They’re not particularly efficient (only about 270HP out of 5.7L) but if taken care of, they probably will go forever.
Definitely an exception, though. Very little else on those cars is still original. But it can be done.
You should visit any third world country: plenty of old cars still running around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irv_Gordon had a Volvo with over 3.25 million miles (5.2Tm), although it's also had 3 engine rebuilds.
And the conversion is actually fairly simple. 1M km is 600k miles, so you were in the ballpark.
Metric is really far simpler, while Freedom Units are like going back to counting change in Roman-inspired £sd.
For the common, everyday use case it isn't meaningfully simpler, which is why the US hasn't switched. The conversions are certainly harder to memorize, but by the time you're an adult you have memorized all the common ones (12 inches to a foot, and so on) so that downside only applies to people who have to learn this stuff (largely children, who don't get a vote). The math is also harder than just moving decimal points, but when you carry a computer in your pocket that isn't actually making life harder for anyone.
So, the two big downsides of the imperial system (conversions are harder to learn and the math is harder) aren't actually a problem for the vast majority of adults in the US. But switching to metric would cause a ton of friction as you have to relearn how to estimate measurements for everything all over again. And those two factors combined are why the US doesn't switch. Most people will not gain any upside, while they have to pay significant downsides. It's perfectly rational to not switch when that is the case! You could argue that it's selfish (because future generations of kids have to learn the conversions, so they would benefit from metric and they don't incur the downside either), but it's not stupid. As much as people like to go "haha people in the US are so stupid for not switching to metric", that simply is not the case.
My parents were in their 30’s when Australia switched. They instinctively think in feet/inches, pounds for body weight (especially babies), but oddly miles hasn’t lasted.
I was educated in metric, but learned imperial lengths doing woodwork with my dad. I don’t have any intuition in pounds or miles, but feet (up to maybe 10) and inches are ok.
My son is purely metric. He can do the arithmetic, but has no intuitive sense in any imperial units.
So .. my anecdata is that it takes two generations to really switch.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232...
If someone says "the only original part is likely the body", then that makes it sound like they've replaced pretty much everything except the body itself, including everything about the engine and transmission.
Pantercel Rhei
What if you disassemble all of the car except the wheels and reassemble it but with new wheels?
How about if you also exclude the seats too.
At what point does the answer change? That’s the whole point of the ship of theseus.
More relevantly, I don't think neurons are replaced. There must be some material churn in the atoms and molecules that make them up, but even then different for different molecules - e.g. I don't know how much of our DNA molecules get replaced over a lifespan from the repair or other mechanisms.
Tattoos however, IIUC, sort of "float" between cells, and as those cells are replaced one-by-one the ink is kept in place by the surrounding cells that are still there.
Answered by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGggU-Cxhv0
First it's his new car, then it becomes his new car with new tires, and then his car with new windshield wipers, and finally his old car with all new parts and some old ones. None of them are the same car.
I think in cases where it' a major rebuild, like turning a WW2 Minesweeper first into a ferry, and finally into Cousteau's research ship Calypso this outlook is more obvious. Are these ships all the same despite getting almost a full refit at each stage? I would say none of them are the same ship, but completely separate "things" with some old and some new parts.
Because if you get chain timing issues on a 2010 BMW diesel, you ain't repairing that, it's more expensive than a new car.
In the article the guy has 3 whole spare cars for donor parts and he does all the work himself. He’s not paying mechanic rates or even buying new parts (which are no longer available).
The amount of time and effort he’s put into this car is undoubtedly more expensive than buying a new car at this point, unless you count his time and free.
Which you generally should, because unless he was going to otherwise be paid for that time there is no actual opportunity cost. The "cost" of one's time is only a meaningful metric inasmuch as one is giving up something which would be more profitable.
Sometimes we're more connected/sentimental about specific physical items, than the prices themselves. I kind of feel like you have to be a special sort of person to own a BMW, so wouldn't surprise me that same "special" person would pay more to repair their specific car than replacing it with an identical one but without that issue.
We didn't have an NPR Classical Music station to listen to, however.
I will note in the future, however, when selling my car, to tune it to NPR.
aka
This is my grandfather’s axe. My father replaced the handle. I replaced the head.
Pretty much every vehicle that isn't equipped with some achilles heel or highly engineered to a price point can go a mil if you take reasonably good care of it and don't mind throwing 0-1 engines and 2-4 transmissions in.
Thanks. As a frequent visitor to the moon, I know exactly what that's like.
But they aren’t, not even close. Oil is massively subisidised by the military before the environmental costs. Brake particulates and tyres don’t cover the cost of microplastics and lung damage, heavy cars don’t pay anywhere near the damage they cause to the roads and bridges etc.
Due to this you can argue pretty much whatever you want by ignoring certain costs depending what you want to come out with.
My petrol car is 20 years old, it’s done 70,000 miles, it weighs about 1,000kg and burns through 300 litres of unleaded each year to do the 3,000 miles I do in it.
I suspect scrapping and replacing this with even a small electric car would not be globally environmentally worthwhile. There may be improvements to local air quality assuming regenerative breaking etc, that may be offset by increased tyre and road wear though, even ignoring the impact of the co2 to generate the 80kWh a year it would require.
However even if it didn’t, if I used it for 200 miles a year would it make sense to buy a new electric car?
It’s never clear cut, and it’s practically impossible to make the best decision in any given case. You can make a regulation which will on aggregate lead to less damage but there will always be exceptions, and on a case by case basis it’s extremely difficult to measure the damage a given scenario applies. How many “units of badness” does buying a new 2 ton electric car before you move it a single mile. Id wager it’s more than an existing petrol car burning 1 litre of unleaded petrol on existing tyres and brake discs.
The difficulty is measuring total impact of the choice. Sure buying a new petrol car and driving 20k miles a year for 6 years will be worse than buying a new electric car and driving 20k miles a year for 6 years. That’s not where the line is.
There are also a few Porsche 911 Turbos with that level of mileage. A guy on Rennlist posts occasional updates about his one which he even tracks quite regularly: https://rennlist.com/forums/996-turbo-forum/662617-high-mile... (Engine was restored once, out of precaution after it blew a turbo at 610K km, but when they opened it up it had very little wear & tear, only a small air leak.)
The secret to longevity really is more frequent oil changes than the manufacturer suggests, and doing most of the mileage with the engine fully warmed up.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-1-2-million-miles-10...
i buy used cars because while I can fix things it time I don't have. I'm looking at a transmisson rebuild - it would take me 6 months to do myself. Or I can buy a newer car that works and get around now.
120km per day of commuting is crazy to me. I work from home and occasionally do a 14km bicycle commute to the office.
The secret: she lives in a rural area and cruises most of the time with constant 80-90 km/h.
A similar car used in a city with many start/stop cycles would probably not last as long.
Maybe my next car will be a Toyota. My 1994 Pickup (like the one the guys on Top Gear couldn't kill) was pretty durable, though the frame did rust to bits at only 60,000 miles.
My dad's BWM E60 has a M47 2.0L Turbo Diesel, and with around 440,000km keeps going strong.
He probably will change it when it reach the half million due to being an old car, but the sad part here is how we won't probably be able to buy any brand new car that could reach that amount of miles without spending a lot of money on the way on repairs.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/mechanic-restores-an-ls-4...
Although the current owner's plan to do a cannonball run in it is something I find off-putting. His previous stupid idea was to put a turbocharger and see how long it will last, fortunately his fans dissuaded him from doing it.
1. Built at a larger scale and at lower margins, so thoroughly tested beforehand.
2. Equipped with fewer features which might require maintenance.
3. Using generationally older powertrains oriented for economy, not performance.
That being said Lexus' original differentiator was reliability - particularly versus its peers price wise.
Also I guess this doesn't apply to various four wheeled appliance manufacturers like GM, Ford, Stellantis, Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi, all of whom do cheap out on essential components.
My dad once got a used saab 99 (a nice tomato soup color) and we rolled the odometer while we owned it. Great car with proper maintenance, which used to be sooo easy and accessible.
The overwhelming majority of 1980s Toyota Tercels do not make it to a million kilometers. This one didn’t, either. It has had every part replaced, many multiple times over.
The owner has 3 donor parts cars and there’s a photo of his piles of parts like alternators. The original car didn’t last a million kilometers. He’s just been replacing parts constantly.
> My guess is none as they are impossible to fix yourself.
No they’re not. I have a lot of car friends and we all do most of our own work. One of them has now opened a shop and services BMWs including engine rebuilds of modern engines.
This is a myth. Service manuals are available. Even the digital repair tools are widely pirated, but you can generally buy a short term license to use them yourself if you want.
As long as some enterprising pirate (probably a shady Russian forum) keeps hold of all the model-specific software.
That being said, you’ll always meet somebody burned by a particular vendor (or their dealer), then swear off them forever. We’re also going through a huge shift in the market with the rise of electrification and China. In some ways electric cars can me even more reliable with fewer moving parts. In other ways the software matters more and batteries replacements can be even more expensive than a new engine in a traditional car.
Sometimes you can link the bad years of a generally reliable vendor to a new part e.g. the first year they might have introduced a 10-speed transmission.
These first years are scary.
Some vendors don’t seem to change major parts as often, which helps their reliability.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/million-mile-tundra-the-...
Toyota gave the guy a new truck so they could study the one he had.
As a Toyota fan boy myself (still driving a 2000 4Runner into the ground), those 2000s builds were such a great era of engineering. That being said, I think they’ve lost a step over the last decade (don’t get my started on the new v4/v6 turbo blocks they’re building…).
Would he have been better off buying four new cars in the meantime?
I know a guy down south (i.e. no rust) who's got comparable milage across his personal "fleet" of '99 Town and Country minivans that he's been running since the 00s. Kinda hard to put a mil on any one of them when he's only one guy but whatever. I know another guy who's got >500k on a Jetta that he runs on waste motor oil from his job and removed all the seats from because utility vehicle.
Nobody will ever write a story about them because "hur hur hur, well kept Toyota" is considered admirable and bending a crashed Town and Country back into shape because you're invested in the platform and learning the ins and outs of diesel combustion the hard way so you can use "free" fuel are considered trashy.
Getting those parts used would be less expensive, and a win for the environment, but the labor cost is very high.
What about the proper unit: 1.2Gm (1.2 giga-meter).
Tercel of Theseus
While it is technically correct to say "1.2 million km" or "1,200,000 km", it is needlessly verbose. It is written more succinctly as "1.2 Gm (gigametres)". However, it is incorrect to stack prefixes like "1.2 Mkm".
After I point this out, the usual complaints will surface: "But no one knows what a gigametre is! We're all used to talking about odometers in only kilometres. No one uses big prefixes." Oh really? Are you telling me you don't know the difference between a kilobyte and a gigabyte? Should we revert to calling a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi frequency as "2.4 million kHz", because kilohertz is familiar to people working with audio frequencies and AM radio?
Overall, I think we should use the right prefixes for the right job. If you're talking about city blocks, use metres. If you're talking about a single trip, use kilometres. If you're talking about annual driving distance, use megametres. If you're bragging about how long your car has survived, use gigametres (or at least thousands of megametres).
This is the only way to exceed the forging cost.
I have an 85 Vanagon Westfalia with a modest 450k km.
Lexus? Subaru Outback?
A modern "ship of theseus" paradox.
It’s more impressive that this man has the fortitude and dedication to keep spare parts, constantly maintain it, and even have back up vehicles for all these years.
If the article mentioned the car had its original engine this entire time. I would have seen it as an anomaly and possibly a good testament to Toyota engineering and need to keep up with maintenance.
That's the kind of thing that inspired us to build a repairable electric battery for ebikes at https://gouach.com !
We want more repair, less planned obsolescence :)
The car ran fine and was ultimately sold to a taxi driver that apparently brought it to close to a million (no proof though).
I think now days people treat cars like phones. Minimal continual maintenance can work wonders and save you a bundle in the process.
Nobody who doesn't have some bias derived ignorance would've been surprised if it was a 4cyl 5spd Ford Ranger in fleet service, an old Volvo 240 or Honda Accord in commuting service, an 2000s diesel Dodge or GM in work truck service, etc, etc. There are a lot of "good" vehicles out there that can get close to half a mil with fairly cheap work, from there it's just a matter of having an owner who cares to make the investment, something much more likely to happen to a "cool niche car" for which there aren't a ton of like-priced replacements available like a Tercel Wagon than a more boring vehicle.
> When it turned over from 999,999 kilometres to 000,000 kilometres in September 2017
The idea of averaging 31k miles a year is just insane to me. My car hasn't done that since i bought it new 8 years ago.
20,000 miles solely for commuting would be about 43 miles each way (if you work 235 days per year), which is obviously more unusual than 20k total miles driven from all sources.
> “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I expect the owner has learned some interesting things in his ongoing mission to continue life with the car he loves.
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I have not seen it stated explicitly anywhere, although it is often a subtext of some discussions about the value of "diversity". Usually positive diversity is talked about either in terms of inclusivity, or of the usefulness of different backgrounds converging to tackle common problems.
But I thinks idiosynchratacity ("idio-synchra-tacity") is incredibly important, as a measure of the health and value of a civilization.
As apposed to diversity of minds triangulating on common solutions to shared problems, idiosynchratacity is the usefulness of having diverse minds seeking to solve novel subjectively motivated problems. With an emphasis on self-generated "problems" or missions, that may appear to no objective value to others.
As information and problem solving tools disperse, there is great value in people who find hard problems interesting, whatever the lack of apparent or immediate merit. Who follow through and solve those problems. Something is always learned. New conditions may be created that in turn create new idiosyncratic problems to solve, or shed unexpected light on solutions to more commonly recognized and valued problems.
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Respect for idiosynchraticity is also a strong measure of reciprocal respect in a society.
Can we respect those we don't understand? The strange, the odd, the weird? Niche artists, serious practitioners of uncommon fetishes, collectors with obscure criteria, mountain climbers, or those that need to "resolve" well solved problems, but in some arbitrarily challenging way. All just for the joy of it?
Widespread idiosynchraticity maximizes civilizations deployment of unbounded curiosity, and the search for new ideas, in the most non-obvious directions.
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Idiosynchraticity also makes the world much more culturally interesting for all of us.
It maximizes the contribution of each individual, when they do something different or orthogonal to mainstream interests, instead of retreading common paths.
More individuals, greater populations, have much greater value if the increase in individuals increases idiosynchraticity, as apposed to amplifying conformity.
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There are obvious things we want from super intelligence as it comes into being. Alignment with our needs, which I prefer to recast as alignment with general ethics (they will need the positive sums of ethics between themselves too), is a big one.
But maximal idiosynchraticity should also be valued. The worst case of course, being an endlessly improving and effective AI, completely focused in turning the universe's resources into paper clips.
A much more realistic, just as tragic fate, would be AI's competitively bent on turning all the universes resources into an expansion of themselves, with no other goal. Each competing to eat the universe, for the only purpose of being the winner, the survivor, at the end of the universe eating context.
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The world/universe will be a much less rich place, if the exploration of reality along seemingly non-practical dimensions dies with us.
I have hopes that curiosity as a practical investment heuristic will maintain the life of idiosyncratic pursuits.
If those pursuits do continue and expand, then super intelligence will truly be an upgrade to our species. Not just a more capable civilization, but more rich as a producer of novel ideas and artifacts.