My first vehicle is still around and running fine. It is a 1989 Mazda B2200 small pickup truck and was one of the cheapest new vehicles you could get back then at about $8000. I drove it all through high school, college, grad school, and even my first professional job. I got hit head on driving on a Vermont country road in grad school. The impact buckled the hood, took out the driver’s side headlight and screwed up the bumper but it still ran fine. I literally tied a new headlight on with rope and straightened out the hood as best as I could with pure force but it still drove the same as always. I didn’t have collision insurance at the time so I drove it that way for over a year until my ex-FIL bought it from me and spent a few hundred dollars for modest repairs. That was over 20 years ago now and it still works just fine as a farm truck. I still see a few others just like it on the road every now and then. They are really simple and robust vehicles.
I believe it…my local mechanic just services a Checker Marathon with California plates, that had just been driven across the country. According to him, no problem getting parts for them at all.
I see a lot of late 80’s/early 90’s Ford Thunderbirds, and also Pontiac Grand Prixs (Prixes?)
I still see plenty of 80s-90s Volvo 240’s around my way. I even owned one myself for a time (it was my first car, passed down to me from my mother); drove it for almost 10 years, then ended up trading it in. Really wish I had held on to that thing, it was a tank.
I’m driving a 1996 Ford Contour. 83,000 miles on the engine. Nearly everything works. The power door locks just quit, but it’s a minor inconvenience, not really worth fixing.
I love my ‘dog car’, so called because it’s the vehicle I used to transport my canines to the vet, the dog park, etc. It’s a 1996 Olds LSS that we bought for my boys to drive when they were in high school and just held onto because it keeps going and going like the energizer bunny. Other than usual basic maintenance (battery, tires, oil changes, etc.) I’ve spent less than $1,000 on it in all the years we’ve had it. It’s rust free, still looks nice on the outside. It’s a bit shabby on the inside, but even that isn’t bad. The air conditioning hasn’t worked for a while, but since it would have to be retrofitted with a unit with post-2000 specs, I have just gone without it.
Stopping the manufacture of the 4.0 was one of the dumbest things they ever did.
The old Dodge/chrysler Darts (equipped with the “slant six” engines were pretty unkillable-I have known people who have driven them over 300,000 miles.
Chevy Suburbans seem to hit 200k miles with regularity.
And the very similar Olds Cutlass Ciera. Same issues, but won’t quit. I bought one(silver, BTW) with 250,000 miles on at auction it and put on an additional 125,000 before the timing belt broke. It could have been repaired, but I opted for a different beater.
None of those cars set any records for reliability/longevity. They probably just have lower mileage and had their oil changed. I guaranty you Buick never build a Century that was worth much.
I’ve seen Lexus with 300,000+ miles on them, but they were cared for and maintained.
It’s all in the maintenance and keeping the metal from rusting.
Bolding mine.
Timing belts are supposed to be replaced at about 80,000 You got 125,000+ out of that one. It did a good job for you.
This maintenance thing is very critical to the longevity of any mechanical thing. Without it, very few machines will last long. OTOH, Some rigs are just so poorly designed &/or built that no amount of maintenance will be able to help it last forever. The Chevy Vega comes to mind
Killing a Toyota - Top Gear - BBC
Part 1 Killing a Toyota Part 1 | Top Gear | BBC - YouTube
Absolutely! My ‘game plan’ on almost every car I buy is to get the initial cost+repairs/miles down to 5 cents or less - it’s a bit of a gamble. I paid $1000 for the car and got 125k miles with no prior repairs, a bit less than a penny per mile on the initial investment. It would have cost about another $1k to replace the timing belt and I would still be left with a 375,000 mile car that may at any time develop transmission or major engine issues. So I elected to junk that one for $300 (bringing the initial investment down to $700) and buy another at auction.
'Cause that’s the way I roll 
That sounds incredibly hard. I like to think I am good with saving money on cars. Every car I’ve bought was 30-40% below blue book (I had to shop around and do some negotiating to buy each of them) and I get my repairs cheap. I buy parts from advance auto parts with a coupon, then hire a guy who works from home on auto repairs. My auto repairs tend to cost me about 1/4 what they would cost at a shop.
But I don’t think I could hope to swing 5 cents a mile for maintenance and the initial cost of the vehicle. That is $500 for every 10,000 miles, 5k for a car you put 100k miles on. I consider myself lucky if I get 10 cents a mile and that is including the resale value of the car. If I put 50k miles on a car and it only cost me 5k in depreciation and maintenance, I think I did well.
My husband’s 1999 Avalon has over 300K miles on it. It’s still running very well despite burning more oil than it should (be has to add a quart or two every so often). He’s driven it cross country twice in the past year for business. The damn thing is so indestructible that we joke it’s going to last to 400K, which is a good thing because I just bought a late-model vehicle and we cannot afford another car payment right now.
I don’t know if either of them are still rockin’, but my landlady from 1995-7 owned a '77 Corolla that’s one of the nicest cars I’ve driven; that baby handled beautifully. Since the landlady was almost blind but wouldn’t let anybody drive the car if she noticed acceleration (speeding, braking or curves), I learned to drive it like it was made of cotton clouds.
Yeah, that straight 6, 4.0 engine was practically indestructible. I had a '99 Jeep Cherokee Sport with a straight 6, and one time, after I had owned the Jeep a number of years, a guy told me that he had worked in collections for President Obama’s “Cash for Clunkers” program. To make sure the vehicles didn’t re-enter the used market somehow, they would drain the oil and coolant, then pour something he described as “liquid glass” (he said the guys called it “Obamajuice”) into the crankcase. That was to make absolutely sure the engine would be destroyed.
They’d then run the engine until it died. Most engines didn’t make as far as a two-minute trip from the shop to the junkyard area and had to be towed the rest of the way.
Then they got a Cherokee Sport with a straight 6 engine. After the “treatment” they had to run the engine for two hours at 3500 RPM before it started to smoke and eventually blew a rod.
I put about 230,000 miles on my Cherokee, then sold it to my nephew about 5 years ago. Last I heard he was still driving it.
The secret in their strategy is the auto auction. I’ve seen running, inspectable cars go for $150 at city auctions - but you had to not mind a few bullet holes, with a little blood and hair to go with the deal. At another city auction my dad bought a running car for (iirc) $300. It had rear-ended someone(s) and messed up all of the front sheetmetal. But if you had got to it before we took a torch to it to liberate the engine and transmission for a transplant, you could have made it road legal (but still incredibly ugly) for less than $50.
If you’re able to get into a dealer auction (if you have a used car dealer that owes you a favor, they can get you in), then you can even get new cars for cheap, but you still can’t really be particular. I drove cars at an auction on and off when I was in college, and saw how they work and what the prices are like. Used car dealers are weird businessmen, it’s almost like they’re all 12. Flashy cars, even really terrible ones like a Camaro that I can’t keep running long enough to pull through the auction house, will pull almost blue book value. I couldn’t keep this leaky mid-80’s Camaro running, but it had loony bodywork, and an after-market digital dash. They flocked to it before it even entered the house, and bid on it like it was a great car. Pickups and off road vehicles were almost as bad.
But pull through in a well-running, boring brown, 15 year old sedan or hatchback with 150-200K on the odo, they don’t really want it. Almost every car sells, but I was surprised when the used car dealers bid one of those up to half of the blue book value, much less half of what they were likely to sell them for.
So if you go into enough auctions with no higher goal than “running transportation in reasonable condition that will fit my budget”, you’re almost certain to eventually get a car.
To add to the list of Terminator cars: I still see second generation (1990–1996) North American Ford Escorts on the road. My '91 had 300k on it when my wife made me sell it. Jeebus, I just realized that almost all of those that I see being driven the rest of the way into the ground are 20 years old. :eek:
And there’s a lot of old inline 6’s that were gorgeous, durable things. I owned more than one Ford 300cid 6 cylinder that had outlived its owner (and half of them lived through me). The inline 6 is probably the best compromise from the engine’s point of view (the least amount of complexity to have a smooth, durable design). But they’re long , heavy, and hard to fit in modern vehicles.
My husband is driving a pale blue '94 Nissan Sentra with something over 350k on it. A few months back I took it over to Target to do some shopping and there were two others exactly like it in the aisle where I parked.