LIVE LONG AND PROSPER Mark Webber sells Porsches for a living, but his commuting car is a 1990 Volvo 740 that has been driven more than 300,000 miles.
By DEXTER FORD
Published: March 16, 2012
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Jacob Silberberg for The New York Times
As a stubborn recession made drivers wary of new purchases for several years, the average age of vehicles on the road in the United States stretched to a record 11.1 years in 2011, according to the research firm R. L. Polk, which tracks vehicle sales and registrations.
Multiply that number of years by the annual miles driven — the E.P.A. uses 15,000 for the cost calculation on fuel economy labels — and it becomes evident that one pearl of conventional wisdom has become outdated.
In the 1960s and '70s, when odometers typically registered no more than 99,999 miles before returning to all zeros, the idea of keeping a car for more than 100,000 miles was the automotive equivalent of driving on thin ice. You could try it, but you'd better be prepared to swim.
But today, as more owners drive their vehicles farther, some are learning that the imagined limits of vehicular endurance may not be real limits at all. Several factors have aligned to make pushing a car farther much more realistic.
Cars that have survived for a million miles or more have been widely documented, of course, but those tend to be exceptional cases. What's different, and far more common, today are the online classified ads offering secondhand Hondas, Toyotas and Volvos with 150,000 or 200,000 miles — or more — not as parts donors but as vehicles with some useful life left.
One driver who has firsthand experience with this new paradigm of durability is Mark Webber, a 57-year-old Porsche salesman.
Mr. Webber has a full grasp of powerful new sports cars — in January he was in Southern California for sales training and track time with the 2013 Porsche 911 — but for his 35-mile commute to Herb Chambers Porsche in Boston, from Scituate, Mass., he drives a 1990 Volvo 740 with over 300,000 miles.
"I just can't see the point of spending a lot of money driving a newer, racier car every day in city traffic when my old Volvo just wants to keep on going," Mr. Webber said. "I guess you could say I'm just a New England tightwad."
In Mr. Webber's case, the enabler of his thrift may be global competition — and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Customer satisfaction surveys show cars having fewer and fewer problems with each passing year. Much of this improvement is a result of intense global competition — a carmaker simply can't allow its products to leak oil, break down or wear out prematurely.
But another, less obvious factor has been the government-mandated push for lower emissions.
"The California Air Resources Board and the E.P.A. have been very focused on making sure that catalytic converters perform within 96 percent of their original capability at 100,000 miles," said Jagadish Sorab, technical leader for engine design at Ford Motor. "Because of this, we needed to reduce the amount of oil being used by the engine to reduce the oil reaching the catalysts.
"Fifteen years ago, piston rings would show perhaps 50 microns of wear over the useful life of a vehicle," Mr. Sorab said, referring to the engine part responsible for sealing combustion in the cylinder. "Today, it is less than 10 microns. As a benchmark, a human hair is 200 microns thick.
"Materials are much better," Mr. Sorab continued. "We can use very durable, diamondlike carbon finishes to prevent wear. We have tested our newest breed of EcoBoost engines, in our F-150 pickup, for 250,000 miles. When we tear the engines down, we cannot see any evidence of wear."
Dr. George Akerlof, who shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economic science with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, may have predicted this trend of owners keeping cars longer.
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