I took a walk through the local U-Pick-It junkyard yesterday morning looking for something for my Intrepid, and since there's nothing finer than a junkyard even on a crisp(!) Saturday morning, I spent a couple hours walking around. This particular yard was biased heavily towards domestic cars and minivans, not too many light trucks or SUVs (and only one LH, sadly...) There were a lot of late-80s early 90s mopars, many with the 3.0L V6.
I found myself looking at every 3.0L vehicle I spotted, checking mileage. I was really surprised to find that many of them were well over 150K miles, and a few topped 200K miles. There were at least two dozen that I looked at. Some of the wrecks had lower miles, of course, but the ones that clearly had just gotten too expensive to repair had made some pretty decent mileage figures. Quite a few were missing their transmissions, so I guess that those were still okay, or had been rebuilt prior to the engine giving out.
So it's good to see that many are getting decent longevity out of what has been kind of a crappy motor for us to maintain with its oil leaks, etc.
I guess the other thing that impressed me (and this was true 12 or 13 years ago when I was a junkyard rat) is that it's strange what people leave in their cars. Cars that weren't wrecked -- so you know the owner likely didn't die at the same time the car did -- with strange things like loads of laundry in the trunk, kids toys in the back seat. One of the high-mileage minivans with the morning WSJ still sitting on the passenger seat. Many cars with still-valid license plates. What are people thinking when they let their cars go? Ok, sometimes when the car quits on the way to work you don't bother to get everything out of it when the towtruck comes. But to just say, ah, the heck with it, so what if the laundry was in the car? Weird. Maybe more of these cases were deaths than was apparent.
Anyway, it's an interesting perspective on the life and death of these machines that we sometimes put so much of ourselves, not to mention our income, into -- to see where they end up. I recommend it.
--Geoff