What Is Considered Normal Mileage for a Used Car
It would be great if a retro car from the 70’s with 50k miles on it could be sold off hand for cheap in perfect condition because the driver “needs money fast”. This is utopia. As a rule, an average driver drives from 10 to 30 thousand km a year. Therefore, a three-year old car with mileage of 30 thousand kilometers is an ideal to dream about.
Most likely, the owner of such a used car will be a mid-level manager, moving mainly around the city between home, store, work and rare forays into the nearest suburbs. But, except for the “white-collar workers,” behind the wheel sit and the girls in big cities, moving on smooth roads, and foresters who travel for 5 thousand kilometers a year, but on rough terrain, and workers who live in the center of a small town with bad roads, overcome daily 200 km to the working object.
In order not to get into trouble and to buy a decent used car from hand, it is necessary to understand at least a little bit which mileage of the car is considered high and which is normal in the city and in a tiny county. It will not be superfluous to know where the driver moved: on forests, mountains, flat roads or potholes.
What factors affect the wear and tear of a car
How much or little a used car has overcome on its journey will depend on:
– The make and country of the manufacturer;
– The roads on which the car has been driven;
– driving conditions;
– the driving style and the owner’s level of care.
There is no clearly defined border, with what mileage it is better to buy a car, what exactly kilometers can be called “normal”. When choosing a used car, you can compare the year of manufacture with the mileage, but it often happens that a young and inexperienced driver for 20 thousand km gets in so many accidents, that it becomes impossible to drive the car, so it leads to the exterior order and sell it with hands, because the mileage is small! One can also meet a perfectionist who washed the dust off his car, looked after it better than his wife, and his 15 years old car looks and feels like just off the assembly line!
Where the car was made
Chinese cars are still not so reliable to buy them with high mileage. Most often the “Chinese” have a trouble-free life for exactly as long as the manufacturer’s warranty. The electronics is usually the first to “die”, then the body and the running gear. The situation is completely different with the German manufacturers, which are ready to run more than one hundred kilometers with due care. That is with the owner, who paid attention to service maintenance, changed all liquids in time, filled the products of verified manufacturers, tracked the corrosion, etc.
On what roads the used car was moved
If the car has covered dozens of km in the backwoods, where there are no roads, even 80 thousand km can alert you. The highways in cities with the million-plus inhabitants are not much better than the forest steppe roads. If you are looking for an SUV, specify from the owner what forest passes he/she rode. Don’t believe if he bought a powerful huge SUV only to park on the curbs. The owner of an off-road “jeep” will hardly share the information that he is an inveterate hunter or fisherman, and every weekend he conquered the taiga on the vehicle he is selling, so be careful.
How to roughly calculate the “normality” of the mileage
Follow a few useful tips from Autocode when buying a used car from hand:
– If a car looks like “seen and seen”, and the odometer proudly shows the figure 40 thousand km, it is not superfluous to ask the owner how he managed to “wreck” the car so badly.
– Find out, how does the owner work? If he was a “taxi driver” on the car for sale, even a few hundreds of thousands kilometers will be normal mileage for a 5 year old car. And if the seller only went to buy groceries and to the cottage with his family, then for 10 years the mileage of 100 thousand kilometers will not be surprising.
– Off-roading, not carried out in time service works, inattentiveness of the owner to the car, “dashing” style of driving will be reflected even in a small mileage of a car.
– Find out everything about the brand and model of the car before you buy it out of hand: how many years the manufacturer gave a warranty, what positive and negative reviews it has, read forums and blogs, learn what units are the first to go out of order. This will allow you to choose a reliable car and know what to pay attention to when buying a used car from hand.
– Choose a car whose appearance, mileage and condition are really worth as much as the seller is asking for it. Greatly understated or greatly overstated price is a reason to think, the mileage may be twisted.
– Pay attention to the odometer, but do not believe it. Every separate case can have its reasons. A small mileage may not be “normal”, if the driver was not conscientious. Just as a hundred miles may not be a verdict.
