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The Street

Samanda Dorger

The Cars That Will Last the Longest

Toyota Honda Volvo Chevrolet Ford GMC Cadillac Nissan iSeeCars AAA

With the price of cars these days, it makes sense to stretch the life of your wheels a little longer.

Back in 1966, a guy named Irv Gordon paid about a year’s salary for a beautiful red sports car. He paid $4,150 for the Volvo 1800S, and kept the car for the rest of his life, driving it a record-breaking 3.2 million miles until he died in 2018.

The so-called 3 Million Mile Volvo is now owned by Volvo. The company purchased the car after Gordon died for its heritage collection, but also to study how the car was able to go so much further than any other car in the world.

Gordon had “a fanatical dedication to vehicle maintenance,” Volvo reported in a 2013 press release.

“I bought my Volvo P1800 on a Friday and immediately fell in love,” Gordon was quoted in the press release that year when he passed his 3-million mile mark.

The company also attributed the longevity of the little sports car to “an extraordinary demonstration of reliability, durability, safety and intelligent design” of their cars.

Irv Gordon reached the 3-million-mile mark in 2013 on a road trip to Alaska.
Volvo

Whether you’re the owner or the car maker, it’s an impressive achievement, and lots of people, whether for love or frugality, would like to make their cars last even a fraction of a million miles.

Car owners in the U.S. kept their vehicles an average 12.2 years in 2022. The average vehicle age in the U.S. has risen steadily since 2013.

The annual average mileage driven in the U.S. was 12,300 miles in 2021. That adds up to 150,060 miles over 12.2 years, less than 5% of the distance Irv Gordon drove his red Volvo.

AAA says that a 1991 Chevy Silverado lasted 1.29 million miles, and a 1956 Cadillac Fleetwood lasted more than a million miles. Long-distance drivers tend to be serious about maintenance, AAA says.

There’s different ways to find out which cars might last longest. Consumer Reports does a consumer satisfaction survey on over 300,000 vehicles over 22 years to determine the most reliable car brands. (Volvo ranks No. 14.)

Data analysts at car search engine iSeeCars tried to determine which vehicles might have the longest lifespan by analyzing over two million cars produced and sold for at least 10 of the past 20 model years, then ranking each model by its highest mileage-achieving cars.

At least 2.5% of the top-ranking 20 models went over 200,000 miles, and the top 1% of these vehicles covered between 230,000 and 297,000 miles over the last two decades. For example, 1% of Toyota Sequoias on the road have at least 296,509 miles on the odometer.

The iSeeCars study isn’t reporting the maximum lifespan of these vehicles, but simply measuring current odometer readings.

“Most of these cars are still in use and going strong,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars executive analyst. “What we see is a list of highly-durable vehicles, capable of more than a quarter-million miles of use if properly maintained.”

There's that maintenance thing again.

Here are the cars, trucks, SUVs and minivans with the longest potential lifespan: