[63]

Kind of a nothing story if everything has been replaced. My car could make it to 1.2M km too if I replaced the engine every time it gave out. Seems like a huge time and money sink for no good reason. Not to judge the man for having a hobby of course, let him have fun, but the news article is misleading.

[unethical_ban]

It becomes a human story, yes. He maintained a durable system rather then junk the whole thing after ten years.

Would he have been better off buying four new cars in the meantime?

[potato3732842]

There are marketability factors at play here.

I know a guy down south (i.e. no rust) who's got comparable milage across his personal "fleet" of '99 Town and Country minivans that he's been running since the 00s. Kinda hard to put a mil on any one of them when he's only one guy but whatever. I know another guy who's got >500k on a Jetta that he runs on waste motor oil from his job and removed all the seats from because utility vehicle.

Nobody will ever write a story about them because "hur hur hur, well kept Toyota" is considered admirable and bending a crashed Town and Country back into shape because you're invested in the platform and learning the ins and outs of diesel combustion the hard way so you can use "free" fuel are considered trashy.

[sharkweek]

A much better example is the Toyota Tundra that made it to 1m miles with only a transmission replacement at the ~800k mile mark

https://www.motortrend.com/features/million-mile-tundra-the-...

Toyota gave the guy a new truck so they could study the one he had.

As a Toyota fan boy myself (still driving a 2000 4Runner into the ground), those 2000s builds were such a great era of engineering. That being said, I think they’ve lost a step over the last decade (don’t get my started on the new v4/v6 turbo blocks they’re building…).