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pulsebait OP t1_j6dn41s wrote

Reply to comment by michal_hanu_la in eli5 why is the age of a car determined by it's mileage by pulsebait

Right, so the part that confuses me is that we can look at mileage and say oh it had every 5,000 miles or 3,000 miles another oil change but this literally does not take into account the fact that this car could have sat idling for many many hours very often. And there is no metric to determine engine output. It just seems like a vital detail that is missing.

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dkran t1_j6dnokp wrote

While what you say is true, mere idling won’t put as much strain on the chassis, cables, suspension, transmission, etc.

Less parts moving = less wear usually, so the metric will hold as well as it can. I suppose you could rate it in hours, like an industrial machine, but that would be a sketchy metric as well. Did you just turn the key, or was the engine running?

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pulsebait OP t1_j6doxmp wrote

This is clearing things up for sure. Don't motorbikes or bikes get rated by hours used? But yes I'm beginning to understand this better.

Maybe partial logic is that a majority of cars have a balanced average amount of highway versus Urban miles?, And that this metric is in fact truest in the sense of modern technology too?

Sorry my articulation is a little fuzzy today.

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dkran t1_j6dq635 wrote

Actually my ebike is still miles. Miles = moving parts.

Motorcycles in the US are also miles im 95% sure. You will see hours on things like tractors I believe or ATVs, even watercraft.

It’s really hard to gauge the overall health of a vehicle via one metric. Just because the car has 5000 miles on it doesn’t mean the previous owner didn’t do them all at 6,000 rpm in second gear for all you know.

This is also part of the reason quality electric cars have decent resale value after hundreds of thousands of miles at times; the drivetrains have many less moving parts than internal combustion engines, so the overall health of the vehicle is suspect to much less “witchcraft”.

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michal_hanu_la t1_j6dqdoz wrote

In practice it seems good enough for most cars. If you have an extremely special use case (eg. a police car idling by the side of the road all day), your mechanic will take that into account.

Planes, by the way, use hours, takeoffs/landings (the number of those is assumed to be the same) and, for big ones, pressurization cycles.

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pulsebait OP t1_j6dzu09 wrote

Hey that's really interesting I did not know that. Thank you

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