I have a 2000 VW Passat with 110K miles on it. How much do I NEED to drive my car to keep it healthy? I’m trying to be “green” and would like to drive it as little as possible. LOVE the show!
Frequency is less important than length of trip. I’d rather get a car that was driven for 50 miles every 3 months than a car that was driven for 5 miles every other day.
If you hook the battery up to a trickle charger, don’t fill the fuel tank all the way up (so you can keep the fuel relatively fresh), and put fuel stabilizer in the tank, you can drive it once every few months.
Firstly…we arent Click…or CLack…we are just a bunch of people that lurk in this forum to try and help people out with their vehicles. Click n Clack dont lurk or answer questions at all in this forum…the forum just happens to be on thier website bec it is vehicle related.
The style of your driving is more important to how often. Just make sure that when you DO drive it that your trips are long enough to properly heat up the engine… Short trips kill engines so…normal infrequent use is fine as long as the car gets to stretch its legs and warm itself up before being shut down again.
and Im assuming this wont be parked for months at a time…then you open a whole new can of worms.
Drive 25-30 miles in a SINGLE TRIP every two weeks.
If you don’t hook up a trickle charger, you’ll probably find your battery getting discharged after a few weeks (maybe three weeks as a very rough guess).
Definitely use fuel stabilizer if you won’t go through a tank in four to six months.
As others have said, when you do take it out, you want to get it up to full operating temperature.
Make sure you follow the time part of your maintenance schedule in addition to the mileage part. We get a lot of people here who inexplicably think the manufacturer put that part in just for fun.
My father still drives a 1990 4runner about twice a year over a 1-2 week period when he comes back to the US. Otherwise it sits and is perfectly fine. He disconnects the battery terminal between usage. This has been happening since 1996.
The vehicle is fine. I think people overthink this one.
The car serves you, you don’t serve it.