- Hi! Arvin Johan here from Malaysia. Just curious on how someone can prove whether a car has all-highway mileage and what's the procedure be like to get it proven back in US?
@arvin_johan
A trick my dad taught me was to look at the break pedal, if the rubber is worn along then more than likely it was in alot of stop and go traffic.
By a lie-detector....
There are some signs like rock chips on the front of the hood, not excessive wear on the brake pedal,... which you can find out by googling them. But there is no precise method for that.
@yaser
All excellent pointers. Another good way to tell is if the steering wheel is shiny/glistening/worn when some parts of it are textured. Of course the obvious workaround for that is to use a steering cover.
Not much else that I can say. Maybe If the car seems to have a ton of miles for its age then that could also be a clue that it was mostly driven on the highway.
Many computers in cars both the ECM and the body computer keep track of hours of operation. This is necessary because of commercial applications such as Taxi or Police car or Ambulance.
A high level scanner like Scotty would have options to read this data. Be aware they may be counting it in some non standard units such as hexadecimal sum of seconds running and would have to be converted to hours.
There are some conversion tables I saw that Ford published on how many hours translated to roughly how many miles on the car. If the miles are high but the hours are well below average for the amount of miles, I would say they are not lying.
If the hours are high against the milage, then you should run or that car has done a ton of idle time like an ambulance or fire truck.
Old fire trucks have very low milage but the hours on the engines is very high for that milage. Eyes open. Brain ON.
@autoelectrical
no high level scanner required for my GMC. It's right on the cluster display.
Good deal. Not all cars have that. There are some translations for average hours vs miles. If you are on the green side of that comparison then its safe to say the car has a lot of highway miles on it
@autoelectrical
I've got 80,678km in 1,801h. That's an average speed of 45kph. That's less that the city speed limit lol! So mostly city driving obviously.
I remember them saying that the average car has an average speed of around 30mph. So I think you are on the good side of things on that one. I am surprised that it is that high. Do some reading on the average speed and hours vs miles accumulated and let me know what you found.
@autoelectrical
30 mph = 48 kph
so I'm just under that
That is a good question. And I have no idea.
Maybe there is something in the computer that counts how many times a car is started.
Could look at the seats and floor mats for excessive wear from frequent entering and exiting.
Shifter, buttons and switches would show more use as well.
Maybe a boroscope inside the cylinders, big carbon deposit usually means too much idling (stop and go traffic).
