My Accord crosses 200K miles

Today my 1993 Honda Accord crossed 200K miles. The current odometer reading stands at 200023miles (that's 321906kms for you metric folks). To give some perspective that is 0.837418 (roughly 5/6) times the average distance to the moon. The car would have to run another approximate 38834 miles (or 62649kms) for it to run the distance to the moon. Even though these numbers may seem impressive, this is still 0.21518% of the Earth-to-Sun distance which is 149597870 kms. If these things seem astronomical (well they are astronomical numbers), then we can come back to earth. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 40075.02kms so the car has traveled 8.03258 times around the earth. Now that feels good right ? It would have to travel a total of 360675.18kms to complete the ninth trip. That would mean another 38769.18kms (or 24090miles) of travel. Sticking with the United States, the distance from Los Angeles, CA to Manhattan, NY is 2778 miles (per Google maps). So the round trip distance would be 5556miles. Hence the car has made 36.00126 round trips between the two coasts. If one wanted to drive from Fairbanks, Alaska all the way to Miami, Florida, the car would have done 20.49 round trips i.e. 20 round and another one-way trip.


Let us look at things from other angles. The car gives me approx 29 - 30 miles per gallon in mixed city/highway driving. Assuming a rating of 30mpg, the car has consumed 6667.43 gallons (or 25238.9807 liters) of gasoline fuel to travel that distance. Maybe when the car was new and was driven more frequently on the highways, the mpg would be higher so this number might be a little bit exaggerated. even than, the car has consumed 6500 gallons of fuel. Just out of curiosity, if the car had a diesel engine, the car would have consumed 6667.43/1.3 = 5128.79 gallons of diesel fuel. This is because all things being equal, a diesel engine typically gets 30% more mpg.


More ways to look at the same thing --- the car has gone through at least 50 oil changes (assuming 4000 miles per oil change), 200 gallons of motor oil (the crankcase holds just under 4 gallons of oil) and 5 sets of tires (40000 miles per tyre set) --- thats 20 tires in all.


Now for some history lesson --- I bought this car almost a year back in the second week of April, when the car had 190993 miles on it. This means that I have driven this baby for a total of 9030 miles in about 11.5 months, which translates to approx 785 miles per month. Another way to look at this is that I have shaved (or should it be saved) 9030 miles off my other car --- 2004 Volkswagen Passat. That car has slightly more than 56000 miles so without the Accord and assuming that my driving would have been similar, the Passat would be over 65000 miles by now. The Accord car was bought from a student who owned it for several years.


Overall, I am very satisfied with this car. It is a fun to drive, stick shift (manual transmission) car with a peppy engine all the while giving a decent mileage. To top it off, the car is still gong strong at 15+ years and 200K miles.

A great many thanks to Honda for making a car worth driving !!!!