yeah 12K a year a WAY conserative...
Heck when I was in high school the school (private) was 25 miles away from my house... You figure I drove back down there at least one or twice on the weekend to visit friends then various errands around town and you've got a lot of miles.
50 miles round trip 6.5 days a week +40 or so for errands (2 trips to the store 10 miles away) that's 365 miles a WEEK
over the course of a year that's almost 19K miles just driving to school/work and running errands.
My father sells vacation homes and lives 80 miles south of the homes/land and 50 miles north of the companie's office. Some days he'll make 2 trips from the properties back to the office... He practically lives in his car.
He bought a 2001 Audi A4 1.8T and put 80K miles on it IN A YEAR. My brother drove it for another 2 years and it had 140K when he sold it. only 3 years old...
The thing is ... they were all highway miles. You can't put that many miles on a car that fast unless they're all highway. And high way driving doesn't really tax a car like stop and go traffic in a city or off-road construction work a truck might perform.
When I worked at the Arcade we had a work truck (an old late 80s Dodge) The truck was used to move machines from the arcade up into the storage area down the street and up a hill. On occasion it would take a trip to the dump a few miles down the road or make a short trip moving some heavy piece of equipment.
The thing had LESS then 20K miles on it and it was BEAT TO SNOT it could barely break 30MPH and just about everything on it broke regularly.
The difference is the truck barely traveled as much as a mile in a week's time but that whole week it was like a slow and painful tractor pull where the truck was hauling it's weight in cargo.
To me mileage isn't really the best measure of a vehicles lifespan/quality. I don't known what you'd use instead but honestly I can stick a car in a clean room and put it on a treadmill for 1million miles performing the scheduled maintenance at half their suggested intervals and I can take another car, bolt it's wheels to the ground and let it sit and rev for years, never performing any maintence... and it's pretty easy to determine which will quit on you first.
Regardless 200K miles is great if the car is still holding up... IMO it has as much to do with the owner as it does with the manufacturer
