How many miles is optimum?

Soa re you saying I don’t have to/shouldn’t drive once a month (or more) to get the engine oil flowing, as it were?

The engine won’t be affected by reasonably long periods of inactivity. The reason to drive the car once in a while is to recharge the battery, scrub the rust flashing off the brake rotors and exercise the suspension. IMO.

Depends on where you live but I have had worse luck with rust in winter from storing in a garage where it gets warm enough to melt. That allows the salt to work on the metal.

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All good points. I’d add blowing the moisture out of the exhaust system.

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Did you not see where I said at winters end or do you just like to argue?

Most of the people on this Forum will say do not undercoat a used vehicle.

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Modern engines are designed to reach operating temperature very quickly, in 2 to 3 miles.
How short are your trips? During warm weather 5 miles is sufficient. When the weather is below zero, a 10 mile drive may be necessary to evaporate the moisture. Probably better to stay home when it that cold.

I have no idea what it costs to undercoat/rustproof a vehicle.

Having said that…if you’re concerned about salt buildup, somehow I suspect the price of regular carwashes will be about the same, or likely less, than the cost of the undercoating.

Personally, if I lived in a salt-prone area of the country, I’d just run my car through the carwash every other week.

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Yeah, I like to argue because it seems you like that because you get irritated quickly :joy: :joy:

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Trips are anywhere from 4-70 miles, and that’s round trip. 2 miles there, 2 miles back, to 35 miles there, 35 miles back. So the least miles, like to the corner store, or the most to friends out in the “country”, though that’s not very often. Average is about 10-20 miles round trip, maybe one week, then it may sit for a week or more if I don’t have appointments or grocery shopping to do. And that’s year-round.

I should have also mentioned the need to keep the battery charged in addition to heating up the engine periodically. We left our new RX350h undriven for 3 weeks or so, the 12v battery was dead, had to jump through a lot of hoops to get to that battery which is under the rear electrically-opened hatch. We make sure we drive it weekly or more often now.

During the COVID lockdown I only drove my 2017 Accord on a 6 mile round trip once a week for carryout and the battery never died. That lasted about 4 months until I had to make occasional appearances for hardware inspection at work. Still, that was only every couple-a-three weeks.

This thread is interesting.

After reading the comments, I’m realizing I gave my sister bad advice. She wanted to buy a 2023 Toyota Camry with 63,000miles and I discouraged her by telling her that the car had too many miles for a one year old vehicle.

My thing when buying a used vehicle is to get one no more than 2 years old with at least 20-30k miles.

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With all the questions you have and the problems you have you have no business giving vehicle advice to anyone.

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Our 58 Chevy with 70,000 highway miles was traded in for a 61. The Chevy dealer painted the hood and put it on the OK used car lt with 26,000 on the odometer. Low mileage cream puff. Just sayin is all. Got an education at 13.

Would somewhat depend on when it was originally purchased and maintained but 63K in a year is a lot for any vehicle. But I do know someone who puts closer to 40K/yr on a Toyota Camry and the car’s still going at over 334,000mi.

Last year? That car could be 2 years old today if it was sold new in September 2022.

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Dealers were allowed to do a lot of things legally back then.
In MN in the 60s, most dealers, regardless of brand, rolled odometers back to under ten miles.
You had to look for other clues like oil change stickers and pedal wear.

Back in the '50s (and probably beforehand), Cadillac dealers would roll-back the odometer of Caddy trade-ins to ZERO, and their slogan was “A pre-owned Cadillac is better than a new car of any other make”.

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