An Ebay Study on Vehicle Make Longevity & Durability (Or why Lincolns are 25 times better than Cadillacs) I’ve been used car shopping lately, so I’ve been paying attention to older cars and how much life they have left in them. I decided it would be interesting and perhaps valuable to compare cars listed on Ebay based on the percentage that have over 200,000 miles on them. 200 K seems like a good indicator of longevity that many cars are capable of hitting and yet still maintaining some value. My method was simple: Ebay shows the total number of cars per make at the top of the page during a search. After discounting the ridiculous mileage (such as 111,111,111 or 1,000,000 even) I counted the number of cars listed with 200,000 miles or more. A little division yielded the percentage of cars per make with over 200,000 miles. I predicted Mercedes, Volvo and Toyota would make the top three. Volvo let me down; I did such a study once many years ago and Volvo stood out significantly above all other makes. I’ve personally owned eight old Volvos and their mileage have ranged from 150,000 to 350,000. Toyota and Mercedes did very well. Lincoln and GMC surprised me; even though I drive my father-in-law’s Lincoln regularly I never have thought of it as a durable car. I have to give my father-in-law credit; his other car is a Toyota: smart man.
The results are listed in the table below; only makes with over 250 cars listed on Ebay were compared. * indicates oodles of cars with ridiculous mileage.
