My ‘96 Toyota Avalon ran and ran. I almost got it up to 300k before I sold it to a friend. He got it to 300k, then sold it again. I still wish I never sold it. I loved that car.
Smaller engines with tighter restrictions and expectations on economy impact reliability, at least traditionally that has been the case, especially from American manufacturers.
Let's imagine you buy a small car for $30,000 and your partner buys an SUV for $60,000. You drive them both for 200k miles, and then at that point they both have a big engine problem and need $10k of work each to fix.
At that point, spending $10k to keep the SUV going seems perhaps reasonable, because it is 1/6th of the SUVs price.
Spending 10k on the car is less reasonable because it's a whole THIRD of the car's purchase price! Makes much more sense to scrap it and put that money towards a brand-new car.
Therefore, people will be more likely to keep expensive vehicles for longer, scrap cheaper ones sooner, and this skews the data.
Of course, I'm not saying the vehicles in the chart are all just expensive and not reliable. Toyota Landcruser there at #1 is legendarily indestructible, for good reason. But there are other factors involved beyond pure reliability which will skew the stats.
Compared to a $20k hatchback, $60-80,000 SUVs are probably a lot more likely to:
Get regular maintenance at the dealership (and get upsold on long term maintenance things without clear immediate benefits), vs the twice a year Jiffy lube treatment
Get body work done if they are in a fender bender, vs just getting written off by insurance
Be driven by older, more experienced and safer drivers
Be stored in a garage, so the bottom of the car doesn't rust out from road salt before they hit 200k miles
#4 is huge. I had an '89 Ford Probe. It had 330000km on it when the bottom rusted out and wasn't worth repairing. Mechanically that thing was still perfectly sound, and probably could have put another 100k on it.
As a sequoia owner who's owned a handful of cars prior to purchasing it at 150k (now 255k) I can assure you it's not on the road just because it's expensive. It's built reliable.
Based on data gathered in Texas? Not real. These are almost just Pickups and SUVs. You never see old pickup in Canada but you see a bunch of more then 10 years old models of Toyota and Honda everyday.
Serious question - How do people with smaller vehicles haul things - Phone a friend, rent a truck for the day, ...?
We have two large vehicles. I haul big things for work (25 miles per day, 3 miles at a time=16mpg). Spouse often has to haul people for work and does woodworking as a hobby (90 miles roundtrip to work=24mpg). So, yeah, we do go through some gas.
I have things to haul about once every few years when I move. Occasionally if I need to haul something I ask a friend/family with a truck to help me. I think when people complain about these trucks being gas guzzlers it's mainly pointed at the trucks people buy when they don't need them and just want a big vehicle that they don't actually use for hauling. They effectively buy a truck to use as a car, which is dumb. If your work demands hauling big things a truck seems completely necessary. If your hobby involves moving big stuff, like woodworking or my friend that is really into home improvement, it makes sense to have something with hauling space.
I drive an Altima, what I'd classify as a "salesperson" car because it gets decent highway mileage and has enough storage space for personal belongings/luggage for long drives in the trunk and paperwork in the front. Outside of moving I think the biggest things I've needed to move in my car are people, a computer tower, and camping/sports equipment, which can get a little snug but is usually fine.
I have a friend with a prius and i was surprised by the amount of space she has. I don't know that it has the cargo height that I need, as I sometimes run into issues with that in my Jeep Grand Cherokee, but I'm going to check it out.
This comment is showing it's age haha. The civics that were built rock solid are not the civics of this generation, those aged out. Modern civics suffered from a range of issues that led to a good amount of them being retired. Ever increasing environmental standards and economic decisions impacted modern sedans reliability hard.
