correlation between million mile trucks & HDEO use

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Originally Posted By: RISUPERCREWMAN
You guys forgot about the 5.4 2v in www.millionmilevan.com ?


Oh man that is AWSOME... Loved that guy... It's my dream to get one of my rides to 1,000,000 miles. I gotta start driving more!
 
Originally Posted By: dnewton3
There are plenty of gasoline fueled million-mile vehicles from many popular brands. And while many are trucks, not all are. Sure - diesels are designed for long lifecycles. But gassers can do very well also.

Exactly. In certain examples, where we do have pickups and cars sharing the same engines (i.e. Chev small blocks, the old Fords, and so forth), those were fairly bullet proof engines in both applications. Taxis would go forever and a day, and so would trucks.

I would suggest the correlation isn't that these are trucks or any oil selection, but that they are work vehicles. These may be maintained fairly well (some aren't, certainly, but the sample size is sufficient to give us these anecdotes), driven enough to accumulate a huge number of miles, and do so in a relatively short period of time so the rest of the thing doesn't rot out or become obsolete (in a parts replacement sense), and replacing them when "fashionable" to do so doesn't make actual business sense.
 
Anyone who has spent much time with air-cooled VWs knows that no version of these engines will run for much more than 10 or 15% of a million miles, and no oil can help with that. Those million mile Beetles are really million kilometer Beetles on their fourth or fifth engine.
The SBC was designed from the start as an inexpensive V-8 to be used in inexpensive cars. While the engine was developed into some remarkable high performance versions, some of which had what are still impressive redlines for a pushrod V-8, like the 302 for the original Z28, it remains a pedestrian design of the mid-fifties that was never intended to live for anything like a million miles. You might get to a million miles on the original block after a few field overhauls, but not on the original cam and main bearings.
The four cylinder Toy you cite was a very solid engine that might make it to a million miles, but only with some refreshing along the way.
Passenger car engines as well as those used in light trucks are not designed or built to deliver anything close to a million miles and those that do probably saw a lot of mechanical help beyond anything that could be reasonably considered maintenance along the way, unless you consider something like new heads, new jugs, new bearings and a new cam for an air-cooled VW to be mere maintenance.
 
Originally Posted By: Hessam
noted... so what would be the top 5 or 10 engines in the past 30-40 years that have really separated themselves from the rest of the pack as far as at least having million mile potential with proper maint.

chevy 350 small block
toyota 22RE
VW air cooled engines

are few that come to mind in the regular passenger car category


None of those engines will make 1 million miles without a bunch of rebuilds.
 
The Heavy duty diesel Engine is a completly different animal.
As for the vw aircooled boxer and also the even worse wasserboxers... you´ll be glad to get 75kmiles out of it.
 
The Chev 305s could make plenty of miles without rebuilds. I've never had to touch bearings on any of the taxis. Cams, of course, are another story. One of the taxis made it over 600,000 miles (retired due to everything else aging terribly) with only one cam, and not much else. They all fared quite well, but of course, the engine oil was always at operating temperature, and fuel dilution was never an issue.
 
I think the Vortec GM motors in trucks, as well as the "mod" (modular) Ford motors, can hit 1-million miles if there are driven enough. There are some other notables that easily can reach long distances; the Vulcan Ford, the Nissan VG30E, the little Toyota 3.4 v-6, etc.

But most vehicles will either rot, be wrecked or traded away before most would ever approach these distances.

There is certainly no assurance that all motors would last that long; all kinds of challenges exist. But the potential is there in some engine designs. And typically what you see in these long-lived examples is just a commitment to routine maintenance; syns and bypass filters are not a necessity by any means.
 
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It matters more about willingness to repair more than the oil (although commercial vehicles are more robust). The other thing working against the normal commuter vehicle is mileage vs age. If you take the "15K mile" average driving behavior, then it will take you 66 years to reach that 1 million mile mark. (Heck, I bet a lot of us might not even drive a million miles ourselves). That being said, the "average" yearly driving mileage would only now be reaching the 1949 model year for the 1m mark. Time kills as much or more than mileage. With commercial driving, you are logging a heck of a lot more miles than your average commuter.
 
Absolutely. Look at my old Audi. It wasn't terribly difficult to repair or expensive to repair. I ran out of time, catching up with the little issues, so moved along. The engine made no hints whatsoever that it was anywhere near the end of its life.
 
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