Hey guys,

Havent been here in a while but now some more q's

My car has 196,561 k's on it.
I would like to know how many k's are left till it dies.

I guess it would depend on whether im maintaining it or not.
I bought the car second hand so i hope from here on to maintain it regularly

Any advice would be helpful thanks

Ben

It does all depend on how you treat it. It could die a week from now or it could die 200k from now or longer. You will want to find issues before they happen a bit of preventive care also. Belt can wear faster on older cars if a pully is worn or a touch off etc.

exactly as stated its all how yu treat it. I have a Mirage Asti 1993model that has been passed frum my brother to meeh and now my younger brother, and we have serviced it thru out its whole life ourselves and its still goin pretty strong for 1,11, 572.11Km's . And might i say i was rough with it when i had it but serviced it dearly. The onlee major thing that we had issues with was ECU which is typical after many years , distributor , cv shafts and a radiator due to an frunt end accident , and an ac compressor . the water pump had a bearing noise a year after it was bought in 1993 and that was changed under warranty , and cam cover gaskets we changed last year. besides that , the engine and transmission are all original

I was going to say "old Magnas never die, they just fade away" but the difference is that it's no longer old when you put in new parts, and they do not cost the same as the car. When you buy a car, you pay a lot for the bodywork, interior, and a lot of other things which don't wear out much at all (seats, bumper bars, rear axle, dashboard, timing chain, large engine mounts, many cables, brake calipers). It's only the moving mechanical parts that need to be changed, and many of them last years as well. My car's engine is 20 years old for example.

It's much cheaper to replace parts as needed, before they get too bad (you need car maintenance software urgently to set dates) and do some anticipatory/proactive maintenance than to buy a whole new car, unless your fuel economy is really bad. Of course, this will entail doing most of your own mechanical work (over 90%) which needs time, tools, expertise and knowledge about where to obtain good parts, both new and second hand. It's a way of life, that brings peace of mind when the results are a working vehicle for many months when you would otherwise have to come up with a whopping big wad of cash in one hit, instead of fairly small, often insiginificant amounts over a much longer time, with no interest applied to them! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/blush-anim-cl.gif)

Curioso

A lot of people think that the older a car, the less time it has to remain working.

If this were true, there wouldn't be commercial (mainly cargo) aircraft that are 30, 40 and 50 years old still flying. They have been kept in the air functioning perfectly for decades due to a regular rigorous maintenance schedule which is often de rigeur for the aerospace industry, to detect flaws before they balloon in a crash. And aircraft are under a lot more stresses than any urban automobile.

Also, older aircraft are frequently retrofitted with state-of-the-art new parts (designed for that plane) which perform better and longer.

In essence, this aircraft is as safe as any other regularly maintained aircraft, because older designs were often safer than newer designs, when commercial considerations started taking precedence over safety. A motor vehicle parallel to this is small cars which cause far more lethal and horrific injuries than mid-size equivalents in head on crashes, not only with cars of the same small size but especially with larger cars (i.e. small car in collision with mid-size vehicle).

While the airbag might appear to be the be-all-and-end-all to safety in a crash, longer mid-size vehicles performed comparably well in test experiments due to the front end being designed to crumple like a concertina. Small cars do not have this feature, hence the proliferation of airbags at the same time they entered the market en masse.

Curioso