by Ancapistani | 2025-08-19 17:26:36+00:00
> On a regular car 300,000 miles is like 20-30 years of use (approximately 30 miles a day). How many cars you see on the road today that are over 30 years old? I barely see any vehicles over 20 years old.

I drive a '91 GMC Sierra. It has 138k miles on it right now. It was made in 1990, making it 35 years old.

> Things wear out on an engine over time, you lose compression over the time and thus power

I've not put it on a dyno, but qualitatively I'd say the 5.7L (350ci) v8 in my truck has 90% or more of its original power. The miles are much less important than how it was used. Mine belonged to my grandfather, so it wasn't exactly street raced.

> you can have other components that will reach EOL.

Sure. This is called "maintenance". It's an ongoing cost - and a compounding one, at that, if you don't stay on top of it. If you do, an older vehicle can be kept in excellent working order for not much money at all.

> A lot of this starts happening on vehicles well before 200,000 miles.

Sure. Most modern vehicles require their first major service at 50k-100k miles.

That's not a defect. That's how they are designed. Some parts wear faster than others intentionally, because they are meant to be replaced.

> I know it does, I've had to deal with it. I am having to replace a knackered turbo on one of my vehicles, and I had to replace the belt tensioner and replace the timing belt, I've had to reseal the sump.

The turbo failing is the only thing here that raises an eyebrow for me; everything else is just standard maintenance.

Modern turbos are doing a lot of work, and depending on the vehicle are often included to meet environmental regulations.

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More to the point, ICE vehicles are well-understood and can be both maintained and repaired by novices without significant risk. I recently bought my wife a 2019 F-150 Platinum. It was in excellent condition overall - interior and exterior are basically perfect - but had a massive oil leak around the timing cover. It had 97k miles on it.

We paid $22k for it. I put $1,500 in parts in it: replacing the $20 gasket meant tearing the front of the engine down, so I went ahead and replaced the cam phasers and all timing components at the same time. I expect it to last another ~60k miles before the next major repair.

I've already budgeted to replace the twin turbos and transmission over the next few years. Even with those costs amortized into my budget, and including the initial cost of the vehicle, I'm paying about 1/3 of what it would have cost me to buy a new vehicle of the same quality.

What's more, it gets ~24 MPG city and ~28 MPG highway. The only modification I've made to that effect is that I added a (~$300) soft tonneau cover to the bed.

My '91 GMC gets 12.5 MPG city... but its retail value is also ~$10k at most. I'd have to drive a lot of miles on a regular basis before it would make economic sense for me to replace it with something more efficient - and even then, I'd still want an older truck, because I don't particularly want to fill our shiny F-150's aluminum bed with gravel but have no problem doing the same with my GMC's steel bed that already shows 35 years of use.

From an environmental perspective, I bet I could drive that truck for the rest of my natural life before I consumed more resources or exhausted more pollutants than would be required to manufacture a new one.