Im not sure if this is in the right place, but anyways....My friend keeps telling me that just because all the vehicles we have are high mileage that they have lost most of their power, reliability, payload, towing capacity and everything else. I cant belive that power/payload/towing, could be decreased by more than 10 percent on a car with under 200K miles. I would like to see some stats on the losses associated with mileage and age. Im about tired of him pissing me off and raggin on my trucks cause they're old. Anybody got links to anything related to this?

 

Its the quality of the care and the kind of miles.
have you used cheap oil, beat the engine past their limits, left the engine thick with crud?
or have you used the best oil, kept it changed, kept it cleaned, kept it all greased and prevented deterioration?

a machine is like a human body, you get in the end the sum of its lifetime of treatment.

tell your Friend to go fly a kite.

 

Nah, it's just a sweeping generalization. Age/mileage performance has everything to do with initial build quality and maintenance/upkeep.

 

all of our cars have had very good care all their lives. my 4runner and my mom's buick we've had since new. my dad's landcruiser was very well cared for until we bought it this year. and we bought my sonoma from a friend who drove it only on long highway trips, and it was part of a fleet and recieved the proper care all its life. As i figured i knew he was full of it(as usual). I just wanted to look for solid proof, so that he would shut up about my cars.

 

Even with the best of care cars get old, the heating and cooling of metal will cause it to brittle over time. Now that I have said that, I do not think the year and milage of the car is the best gauge of how many heating and cooling cycles the engine has been through. IMHO it is a pig in a poke, you can never really tell. On this board alone we have seen reports of 400K 3vze engines that never need major work, and brand new engines not even a year old that qual for the lemon laws.

 

Maybe your friend is thinking about Fords (all the fords i have owned were crap). has he ever experienced the glory of a toyota?

 

no toyotas for him......hes got a 01 silverado 1500 (love that truck), a 98 honda prelude, and a 78 Ford Bronco, which is partially mine. We just had to put a new engine in the bronco.....he had a new transmission put in the honda, and the reverse doesnt work most of the time. and the sliverado is the only truck that is worth anything in my opinion, and of course hes trying to sell it.