Cleaned this one up. Read this one last night and was gonna chime in, but got sidetracked.

I prefer new and old for different reasons. I've always enjoyed wrenching on vehicles, but that becomes tedious when the job gets complicated, bolts break, things rust off, or things don't go as planned. I've gone through cycles in my life where I have newer cars and trucks for a couple of years and grow bored, so I get an older vehicle. After 2-3 years of working on them I grow bored of working on them, so I send them on down the road. Just sold my old '97 Lincoln after I had it for nearly two years. Put 32,000 miles on it and was able to sell it for what I paid for it. Can't argue with that!

The one constant for me is that my older vehicles have cost me many thousands less over the course of ownership compared to depreciating a newer vehicle.

 

Sorry late to the response here, kinda dead thread but I'll add my experience for posterity. Our vans are pretty darn solid up to about 750,000 miles, or about 3.5 years of service. They are all 06-13 E-150-350s bought new but about a year late (old stock). I start having to mess with them when they're over 800k, and once they are at about a million miles there's a lot of stuff coming up. That's not going to translate directly for the average Joe though since we do so much highway. As a crude translation, our brake jobs come around every 300,000 or 400,000 miles. I think brake jobs more normally come up around 60-80,000 miles maybe. So using the middle of those estimates, you could figure that our vehicles last 5 times longer than they would under average use. So translating our experience to normal use, maybe you'd find small things creeping in at around 150K miles and at 200,000 you would see regular and more serious issues to deal with if that guess is accurate.

Businesses use new or newish vehicles for a reason. You loose money when they aren't operating as you mentioned, but also your customers have more confidence in your company when you operate new equipment and you get a tax break. Lots of incentives. Personal vehicles are in a different situation. I actually think it's pretty cool to see an older well maintained vehicle driving down the road.

 

I like reading your experiences. I always try to find a way to make the info useful to me. Such as:

I dislike vehicle age more than mileage. Id prefer a 2012 E350 with 125,000 miles over a 2002 with 85,000. My reasoning is regarding: 1. the non-moving parts and 2. the moving parts that don't move ENOUGH on a low mileage vehicle.

Using the example above, the 2002 van has spent too much time sitting dormant. That's bad for seals, o rings, gaskets, etc. Just a theory, but I feel like it probably has a negative effect on bearing surfaces also: imagine an axle/spindle supporting the van weight on one tiny piece of the roller bearings for a period of months, without moving.. Same for crankshaft/rods, etc.
Also motor brushes last so long that a person forgets until they're stranded: starter, alternator, hvac motor, fuel pump, washer fluid pump, power windows, electric cooling fan...

And regarding the non-moving parts: Unknown, non visible corrosion in/at electrical connections. Wiring and its insulation gets brittle, and/or loose. Vacuum hoses, rubber coolant hoses. Door seals, handles break, electronics like radio and control modules, o2 sensors, then one day a portion of the dash cluster doesn't light up...

Ok ok I'm rambling; Delgriffith, what is your experience regarding life of rubber parts, and what about electric motor-type items?

In conclusion, the only thing I CANNOT fix or maintain on my E350 is : transmission rebuild, and rear axle fine adjustments. The issue is that I don't have quite enough money to pay a professional for unexpected repairs, and I certainly can't afford the TIME (nor the downtime).

And since my van is my most important work tool: I need it HIGHLY reliable.

 

Rubber parts? I guess I'm going to stick with the same statement, 800,000 miles, 3.5 years. The main ones that have been issues are coolant hoses. I don't preemptively change them since I haven't been able to identify a pattern of failures. Many hoses will last us the 6 years and 1.3 million miles we put on before a van retires. Then there's radius arm bushings. Those blow out around that 800,000 3.5 year mark. The 2008 and newer vans have a different design though and I've never changed them even on our 1.3 million mile '08. Sway bar bushings in the '06s are another story though. I had to change those early on, maybe around 400,000 or less. But once we got Moog bushings in they never went bad again. The '08 and on design is different and there isn't the same kind of sway bar bushing, and it's never failed.

The only electric motors that are ever an issue are blower motors. They fail every year and a half about, but I've done so many of them that it's a 1/2 hour repair to change one for me. Not a big deal, so long as it fails in decent weather or near our garage. I guess I recall having to change a blend door motor once on an older van but that was an oddball one.

Dash lights going out was a problem before the newest dash style came out in maybe 2009. Haven't had issues with them in our 2010 van and onward. They are relatively easy to replace on the older vans though.

Over the relatively short time frame I've been doing this, I have definitely seen a progression towards more and more reliability. Sometimes they make a step backwards, like with the hood release cables for instance, but not usually. I have no doubt that if we were trying to run this operation in the 1980s, we'd need a couple full time mechanics and several backup vans instead of one/two backups and one part time mechanic (me).

 

Wow...


Ya'll must be bored...


Yeah I had a 20 year old pickup with only 65,000 miles on it. Dead serious. I didnt drive it much over the two decades I owned it.....sometimes I felt pity and would take it for a drive just to keep things lubricated and moving.

Truth be told, it was nowhere near worn out, but some things had begun to deteriorate just from old age and non-use...

Where have we heard that before?



Every year whenever I took it in for its annual safety/inspection sticker, the mechanics usually made some comment about it...noting that it had only been driven a few thousand miles since its last inspection....

Yup...I mainly rode motorcycles for the last 30-40 years and wore out a few bikes, but the pickups I've owned have mostly just sat there in the driveway...mainly called on when something needed hauling or there was snow or ice on the roads...

But this (new to me) cargo van is getting more usage...not a lot of miles, but more than I put on the old p/u truck.

I've put on 11,000 miles in 18 months....thats a lot of miles for a 4 wheel vehicle under my care.

Yeah...I like newer, but for me it makes no sense to buy a new car every few years....I dont even come close to getting my money's worth out of one until I've owned it a decade or two...

Motorcycles?...now thats a different story...

 

Does it seem like radiator hose, at least OEM, lasts a hell of a lot longer than "back in the day"? Maybe made of better stuff.