When properly maintained, well-built cars can last an impressive amount of miles.
Consider this 2006 Honda Civic, which hit one million miles on its original engine and transmission. Amusingly, the car’s odometer maxes out at 999,999 miles.
While that case may be an extreme outlier, most modern cars are expected to last 200,000 miles before experiencing some significant failure. That’s roughly double the lifespan of cars from the 1960s and 1970s, which typically lasted about 100,000 miles.
In this infographic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Ls and Athul Alexander used data from iSeeCars to determine which cars are the most likely to reach— or even surpass—the 200,000 mile benchmark.
Study Methodology & Data
To come up with their rankings, iSeeCars analyzed over 2 million used cars between January and October 2022. The rankings are based on the mileage that the top 1% of cars within each model obtained. Models with less than 10 years of production, such as the Tesla Model 3, were excluded.
The following tables show an expanded list of the longest lasting cars, by model category. Our infographic only includes the top five from each.
Honda has been plummeting in quality. Toyota is still #1, but they make some of the ugliest, most outdated design and most utilitarian/basic interior. Personally I’d rather buy a different mid-grade brand keep it 7-8 years and trade it in for something different than to be stuck with the same ugly Toyota for 15+ years.
Most of what I see is Toyota #1, Porsche #2, Mazda #3. Nissan, Chrysler/Jeep and Land Rover are at the bottom.
From what I have experienced after being in business almost 40 years is that nothing out there can compete with a GMC or Chevrolet work truck . We have had several go over a million miles and at least 30 vehicles go up to 500K plus and are most are still on the road . As to the foreign cars , Toyota , Honda, Kia , BMW , Mercedes , Nissan their quality has become inversely proportional to the amount of cars they produce. I notice that several of my employees have bought these brands new and have had an huge amount of mechanical and electrical issues while the employees with Tahoes, Yukons, Camaros, and regular Chevy & GM pickups have the least amount of issues. Nothing beats real world experience as opposed to foreign companies paying off Consumer Reports and Car & Driver to promote their brands.