Friday, April 03, 1998

Inverted Mileage Theory
by Paul Maghielse ([email protected])
and David Wolpe ([email protected])

It's a summer's day in Foolville. Late afternoon light splashes through the leafy maple trees onto the bright pavement; a bee buzzes in Granny Smith's honeysuckle bush, and young Alex ("Red") Delicious pulls wheelies on his new Schwinn. Parked in two identical driveways are two identical Foolmobiles.

A weary stranger, tie loosened against the summer heat, walks along the uneven sidewalk. He's walked a long way. He mops his brow and squints to see the house numbers on the street. When he comes to the two driveways he stops and stares at the two cars.He has come to buy one of them. The question for him, and for you, is: which?

Foolmobile A is owned by Granny Smith. It is five years old to the day, hasn’t a scratch on it, and has a mere 50,000 miles on the odometer. Granny Smith, who spends her days baking apple cobbler for the local bake sales, never ventures out past the Foolville city limits. She drives the car on short trips between the high school and the supermarket. She has run the vehicle about 6 days a week for the last 5 years, because, at the very least, she picks up her mail at the end of the drive each day by backing up the 100-foot stretch from her side door. Yes, it's true that once she crushed an entire patch of African violets, but never mind that now.

This is the nineties, and Granny is hip. She has a dedicated ISDN line and she spends hours surfing the Web each and every night. She's read our How To Buy A Car collection, and she knows Edmund's and CarPoint like the back of her hand. She has a price nailed down and she’s not budging. After plugging all the variables into her spreadsheet, Granny determines that a generic Foolmobile with 75,000 miles on it is worth $8,700, but hers has low mileage: 25,000 miles less, to be precise. So she marks it up 5 cents a mile (0.05 x 25,000 = $1,250), giving her a new selling price of $9,950. Should the stranger inquire, she will justify the price by saying, “This puppy is no lemon. Not a moment's trouble. In fact I’ve hardly done more than put gas in it for the last five years!”

Meanwhile, next door...

Foolmobile B is owned by Goldie Delicious, young Alex's mama, and it too is five years old to the day, and hasn’t a scratch on it, but it has an astonishing 120,000 miles on the odometer. Yikes! Did we say 120,000? Yes! And what's more, Goldie uses the car almost exclusively to commute back and forth to her job, managing an amusement park which is 20 miles south of Foolville, just off the Interstate.

Goldie has always taken top-notch care of her car, but lately things have started to wear out. New brakes at 80,000 miles, a new exhaust system at 90,000, and just the other day she had new plugs and plug wires installed.

Goldie, her time consumed with fending off lawsuits from disgruntled, nauseated spinning-teacup riders, and with berating lazy custodians and surly park guides, has no time for the internet. Fortunately, though, she's able to call upon her plugged-in neighbor, Granny Smith, to help in valuing her Foolmobile. The stranger watches as she dashes over to Granny's place, bowl of sugar in hand to contribute to this week's bake-off, not even noticing that young Alex is now pedaling up the slate roof of the Delicious house.

Granny greets Goldie with a big hug. “Goldie, poor Goldie, so beautiful yet so ignorant, your Foolmobile would have been worth $8,700 if you'd driven only 75,000 miles. But with 120,000 miles? Well, you’re going to have to take a hit for that. You'll be lucky to get $8,100 -- and that's if you smile that real pretty smile of yours!”

The stranger in the street now turns to you, dear reader, and asks, "Which is the best vehicle value in the market place?"

Well, let's think about this.

The real difference in these two vehicles is not the mileage at all, but the drivers: how and where the vehicles were driven. Any mechanic can tell you that the majority of your big-ticket repairs in used vehicles are located under the hood: the engine, transmission, their support subsystems, and to a lesser extent, the steering and suspension systems.

So let's ignore the mileage for a moment and think about these big-ticket items. Mechanical systems wear out, and the only lifeblood they have is lubricating oil. Now consider when the majority of the wear in an engine occurs. It's when you first start a cold vehicle. Before the oil can fully circulate -- lubricating, providing a thin film of protection on the metal parts of an engine -- mechanical wear is occurring. So much so that many experts say that when you cold-start a vehicle, it is the equivalent of driving it 500 miles on the freeway, in terms of engine wear.

Granny Smith started her vehicle cold every day, sometimes repeatedly, as she shuttled to the mail box and back, to the store and the bake sales. Goldie, on the other hand, cold-started her Foolmobile just once in the morning and once in the afternoon. From strictly an engine wear perspective, Goldie’s car appears to be worlds ahead of Granny’s.

If you’re a buyer, you’re also interested in how much it is going to cost you to keep your car on the road over the long term. Remember how Granny was bragging about not having to do much more than put gasoline in the vehicle? Well that might be true, particularly since Grannies hardly ever fib, but what does that really say about the vehicle? Hmmm, it’s gonna need brakes soon! (Brake wear, and any other mechanical wear for that matter, are great issues to bring up with that mechanic consultant. If you’re paying for it, go ahead and demand answers to your questions.)

“But wait a second,” you cry. “Goldie didn’t have her brakes done until 80,000, and besides, she has almost as many miles on the replacement brakes as Granny does on the originals!” As someone famous may have once said, “It’s the mileage, stupid!” That 80,000-mile brake job is in “Goldie Miles,” which are completely different from “Granny Miles.” When, after all, do brakes wear? When you apply them. How often do you use them wheeling down the Interstate at 65 MPH? Not often, and the odometer clicks away. Now think about how often Granny uses her brakes. She seldom goes more than a quarter mile without at least tapping the brake pedal. All this means that Goldie’s 40,000-mile brakes are worn with the equivalent of 20,000 “Granny miles.” Now who wins the brake battle?

We can make just as strong a case as to why Goldie’s exhaust system wins its battle, and ultimately why Goldie's Foolmobile has a rather large mechanical advantage over Granny’s. Toss into that already boiling pot the cash difference in the deal of $1,850 ($9,950 - $8,100) -- almost 20% -- and it is not very hard to see how easy it is for you to tell that stranger which car to choose.

The moral of the story is: do a little inverted thinking when buying a used vehicle. Don’t blindly follow the “rules” of used car buying. Sometimes a mile is more than a mile. And sometimes less.

The stranger dabs his handkerchief to his brow with a relieved smile. "Hey kid," he says to Alex, who is now doing a triple lutz with a flip on his mountain bike, "would you mind telling your mom to come out here? I want to make an offer on her car."

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