Just a couple of months back, a tip from a Denver tow-truck driver led me to a 1988 Honda Accord LXi residing in a car graveyard with an amazing 626,476 miles showing on its odometer, making it the car with the biggest credible odometer reading I'd ever found in such a place. Then a reader pulled my coat about a car with even more miles, which he spotted in another Denver-area yard.
Yes, here's a 32-year-old Volvo 240 sedan that beats that 34-year-old Accord by 5,523 miles. My previous record-holder, a 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E with gasoline engine and manual transmission, had spent more than five years as King of the Murilee Martin High Junkyard Miles Hit Parade, but the Accord LXi managed just two months.
I happened to be in Luxembourg, land of my ancestors, when the tip came in, so I called up fellow car writer and junkyard aficionado Andrew Ganz and asked him to get right to that junkyard immediately and shoot photos for me. The reason for the urgency is that Volvo 240 gauge clusters sell for good money on eBay, and Colorado's Front Range has plenty of wrecking-yard regulars who buy every one they see. Ganz is a mensch—that word means the same thing in Luxembourgish as it does in Yiddish, by the way—and so he got right down to U-Pull-&-Pay; he even bought the cluster for my collection. I visited this car immediately after returning to Colorado, which is why some photos show different weather and missing parts.
While I have seen quite a few Volvo 240s with better than 300,000 miles during my junkyard travels (and so many surpassing 200,000 miles that they aren't even noteworthy), the only discarded Volvo I'd found with more than 400,000 miles prior to this one was a 1990 740 Turbo wagon with 493,549 miles. I suspect most Volvo owners who keep their cars alive past 400,000 miles plan to keep them long enough to hand the keys over to their great-grandchildren, so such cars tend to avoid the knacker's yard.
This one had just about every option Volvo offered on the aging 240 in 1990, including sunroof, automatic transmission and air conditioning, but checking its history via the VIN told a story of numerous salvage titles and frequent ownership changes. My guess is it was a cheap beater for owners with long commutes, and the last one gave up on it when something expensive finally broke. The resale value on an old, battered sedan with so many miles is indistinguishable from the equivalent weight in scrap metal, so here it sits.
The B-Series "Redblock" Volvo engine is well-known for reliability; this one is a 2.3-liter with SOHC configuration, rated at 114 hp. Is it the very same mill that lived in this engine compartment when the car rolled off the Torslandaverken assembly line in Gothenburg? Maybe! I'm somewhat surprised by an automatic car surviving long enough to drive 25 times around Earth's equator, but automatics are easier to sell and perhaps that gave this Volvo a survival edge over the decades.
Here's where we talk about the key disclaimers and caveats in the Junkyard Treasure Odometer Official Standings. First, entries are limited to vehicles I personally visit in an open-to-the-public wrecking yard (since I have documented 2,348 junkyard vehicles—mostly in non-rusty regions—and checked the odometers of hundreds of thousands more, this is a meaningful sample size). Second, I only consider vehicles with odometer readings I deem trustworthy (which rules out, say, the '82 VW Rabbit Cabrio with 930,013 miles showing on its notoriously flaky odometer mechanism).
I know I must have looked closely at many junked vehicles with better than a half-million miles having passed beneath their wheels (especially American pickups and 1970s Hondas), but odometer technology keeps us from knowing the truth in most cases. That's because nearly every manufacturer used five-digit odometers into the 1980s (and, in the case of the Detroit companies, often well into the 1990s); cars and light trucks weren't expected to reach 100,000 miles until the last few decades. Then, starting around the turn of our current century, digital odometers conquered the automotive world. The only way to read a digital odometer is to power up the vehicle's ECU, the difficulty of which ranges from tricky to impossible in a boneyard setting (though I'm working on it).
Here's the current Murilee Martin Junkyard Odometer Top Ten, now that today's Swedish Brick has shoved the Accord LXi off the top of the pyramid:
- 1990 Volvo 240 DL, 631,999 miles
- 1988 Honda Accord LXi, 626,476 miles
- 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E, 601,173 miles
- 1981 Mercedes-Benz 300SD, 572,139 miles
- 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300SD, 525,971 miles
- 1988 Honda Accord DX, 513,519 miles
- 1990 Volvo 740 Turbo Wagon, 493,549 miles
- 1988 Toyota Tercel 4WD Wagon, 413,344 miles
- 2002 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, 412,013 miles
- 1983 Honda Accord, 411,794 miles
That's three Mercedes-Benzes (two of which are diesels), three 1980s Honda Accords, two 1990 Volvos and one apiece Ford and Toyota. It's a sad day for fans of high-mile Mercedes-Benzes, because a 1985 300D with 411,448 miles no longer makes the Top Ten cut. I just documented another Accord that qualifies for this list, by the way, but it will push a fellow Accord off the Top Ten and keep Honda tied with Mercedes-Benz… for now. Toyota might be getting a bad rap here, because Camrys and Corollas with more than 300k miles are a dime a dozen in junkyards, far outnumbering any other manufacturer's discarded vehicles I see in the 300k-400k range. I suspect that, like irritatingly sensible Volvo owners, irritatingly sensible Toyota owners cling to their cars forever once they hit the magical 400,000-mile mark.
I hear from quite a few of you with stories about your still-driving high-mile cars and, while I enjoy discussing such survivors with you, I'm more of a junkyard historian and have no plans to put together a Top Ten Not In the Junkyard Yet High-Mile Club Honor Roll. That said, if anyone has a 500,000-mile Renault Alliance, let me know immediately!
