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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

> 70,000 miles is an incredible distance

Is it though? That's a third of my car's, and it has not had a suspension issue yet.

Maybe it's different in the US, but as far as I know, at least French diesel cars are usually expected to go at least to 70 000 miles (100 000 km) without a major issue. Gasoline engines are supposed to have a lower life expectancy, but I don't know what's a reasonable expectation for those.

Now, it's still impressive that Tesla fixed this problem for free and that old a car (but they're under more scrutiny than other car makers, so they don't have much choice). But to me, considering 70 000 miles "an incredible distance" means having quite low expectations.

What would be a non-incredible distance for you?

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I have a land rover discovery 3 with 180k miles on it(4.4L V8, 2005 model) that I drive daily and it has absolutely no issues. Having said that - I guess what OP meant was that if the owner drives the car through dirt every single day, that reduces the longetivity of a car VERY quickly. In most car manuals you will find a "service" section which will very often say something like "full service is recommended every 20k miles, unless the car is used in difficult conditions, then full service should be done every 5-10k miles". Maybe this Tesla was serviced that often, maybe it wasn't - but 70k miles with a lot of use in "difficult" conditions is quite a lot for a production vehicle without uprated suspension, mud guards etc etc.

No, most people in the US would expect a decent car to last at least 150,000 miles.

Define "to last". Having one part needing to be replaced is not a total loss of the car.

I think the point that many are glossing over in their anecdata is that those cars they got 100k+ miles on where likely a decade old. The Model S in question is probably under 3-4yrs old, likely much less. 70k miles isn't much, yes, that's true. 70k miles in 1-2 years is however a very different scenario than 70k miles in 4-5 years.

How do you see the timeframe effecting wear and tear on a car? (In a general situation, I mean; not necessarily down a dirt road every day.)

Take 2 cars. They each drove 70k miles; car A took 1 year, car B took 4 years.

It seems to me that car A will have less wear and tear simply because it's much more likely they were putting highway miles on their car. Aren't highway miles easier on all the components?

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