You might feel like you spend a lot of your life, perhaps even too much of your life, in your car. Me" I commute every day from the second floor of my house to the first floor. Then we have the other extreme. In conducting TrueDelta?s car-reliability survey, I confirm odometer readings that are either unusually low or unusually high, in case there?s an extra or missing digit (it happens). About one percent of the cars in the survey clock more than 3000 miles per month, roughly triple the average. That’s not many. So I figured it had to be a mistake when, back in June 2012, someone reported 151,000 miles on a 2011 Ford Fiesta. As it turned out, the owner, a user named Mike, was just getting started.
Mike, once a long-haul truck driver, is now a medical courier who drives 16 hours each day, five days a week. Many people say they like to drive, but few have this level of love (or even tolerance) for the activity. From June 2012 to June 2013, Mike drove the Fiesta another 196,000 miles. From June 2013 to June 2014, he topped that at 198,000 miles, driving six days a week for much of the period. Then he scaled back to five days per week, and drove merely 153,000 miles from June 2014 to June 2015. Last September, the odometer on his little Ford rolled over 740,000 miles. What?s it like to drive 80-plus hours a week" ?Peaceful,? apparently. Mike spends most of these hours at night on the open two-lane roads of southeastern New Mexico. The day,...