200k Miles - Totally Reasonable Or Completely Absurd?

Cars are the most ridiculous things - Let me tell you why. First, we practically live in them! Don't believe? Well, if you drive an average 15000 miles per year, then that means you will sit in your car for 25 days per year(assuming an avg 40mph and that you spend every waking hour driving). And plenty of people average 20 mph and do 25000 miles per year which means they are spending 83 of the days of a year days navigating traffic. Cmon man (or woman), don't you have anything better to do?

And the amount of resources consumed - Bewildering!

Just the gasoline consumed by one single car in one year is about 750 gallons (15000m / 20mpg) which correlates approximately to completely filling a nice size hot tub twice.

And that is just to tote one person around for just one year! Consider that Americans drove around 2,656 billion miles in 2008 (yes! 12 zeroes after the 2!) which corresponds to filling over 380 million hot tubs. It boggles the mind to consider that most of that fuel comes from half way around the world. Somebody is making some money here and it is not me!

And the friggin tires! Assuming 20,000 miles per set on a car, that is a bit over 500 million tires. Where do they all go?

Your car went 200000 miles?

Then we get all amazed when they actually get to 200k miles. Lets look at this number a bit. It seems most people drive a car about 15k miles a year. So, really, we are only thinking that your car should last 13.5 years which seems reasonable(200,000m/15,000m/yr). Digging deeper we calculate that this means that the motor only needs to run 3700 hours (200,000/55) or 153 days(assuming 55mph - no sleep for cars).

Amazingly, that's what the car companies are designing for - cars that are expected at the high end to only run for 153 days before being considered completely worn out!

On the flip side, that distance is almost as far as the moon is from the earth. Additionally, the engine spun 667,000,000 times to get there.

Who do you work for anyway?

So, then you find out that the US auto industry employs 1 in 10 workers which is an improvement over the 1 in 6 just before the great depression. Well, what do these people do other than make their share of the 15 million cars sold in the US?

Well, they DRIVE!

All of them(considering they make cars)!

Now I'm all good and happy that people can buy cool stuff and all that but is this just a big shell game? Do we make money so that we can drive so that people can make cars so that we can make money?

What did we do when we didn't have a 4000lb steel cage to tote us around when we needed a fresh carton of milk.

Hey, I never said I had the answers.

Andre Turrettini has'nt been killed yet by his curiosity. Check his automotive blog aggregator here http://itestcars.com where you can keep up with news related to your Porsche or Audi or maybe keep tabs on detroit's bailout plans. Also note his personal blog http://theanticool.com - mostly on movies and software.

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