450,000 Miles and Still Going Strong

Brian England, Thu, Feb 7, 2020

My blog earlier this month dealt with the trend of keeping older, low tech vehicles. Proof positive of this recent movement in car ownership is our long time customer, Bill Homans. Bill stopped by recently to celebrate his 2012 Kia Sedona reaching an impressive 450,000 miles! And those were not easy miles. Bill spends his time delivering flowers all over the Frederick area. That’s a lot of stopping and starting.

We usually hear about people with high mileage vehicles that are mostly logging highway miles, along with some taxis that serve airports often reach 500,000. Stop and go driving in town is hard on a vehicle. Tires and brakes wear out faster, oil gets dirty quicker, and transmission needs servicing more often.

All this adds up to a Kia not lasting very long unless you keep up on the maintenance. And that is exactly what Bill did. He was religious about his maintenance checks with us and that made all the difference. Preventative maintenance comes at a price but it’s a lot cheaper than buying a new car.

At BA Auto Repair, we monitor how much a mile maintenance costs. The average cost is about 5 cents a mile but the higher the mileage the more this goes up. When the vehicle is young it’s a lot lower. With the advent of electric cars, the cost of preventative maintenance has gone down to around 2 cents a mile.

Bill checked out a Kia forum to see if anyone can beat his 450k milestone. No one came close :)!