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Comment by hn8305823 | Hacker News Reader

> The vehicle in question is an all-wheel drive unit that had 72 miles on the odometer when it was delivered.

I've bought eight brand new cars in my lifetime (some co-bought with a partner). I don't think any of them had more than 20 miles on them. Some were as low as single digits. I would be mad if I were paying a premium for a brand new car and it arrived with 72 miles on it.

At least with an electric car I'm not worried about how the engine/drivetrain might have been abused, but there is still wear and tear on the surfaces (interior and exterior).

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What do you do in the first 100 miles in your new car, or fear others would be doing, that makes it worth the premium?

Drive it like it's new. Baby the engine, baby the transmission, baby the entire system. Avoid problems when you run it like it's stolen when everything is brand new.

It USED to be the break-in period was super important. I've been told that it's not anymore, but that comes from salesmen. So. Who knows if it's accurate or not. I also do not know how that applies to the electric motors on a new electric vehicle.

But I'm betting that's the reason.

I’ve always questioned this assumption. Doesn’t the factory do a burn-in test for the engine and drivetrain? I’d be shocked if they really were delivered without any basic bathtub-curve test performed.

Yeah, if you've ever seen them loaded onto the trucks, it isn't necessarily done in the most careful manner. They don't get babied before delivery in a lot of cases.

Having said that, once production is in full-swing, they are unlikely to get full "burn-in" tests.

Early production may get a little more for various reasons.

Every time I read anything about a "break in" on cars it always felt like people were just repeating old wives tales because I could never get an answer on what the result would be if I ignored it.

Will the transmission last 5000 extra kms or the engine will make it from 500,000 to 501,000 km? No one seems to know.

Makes it feel like poeple telling me I have to discharge a battery all the way because it has "memory" long after most batteries were lithium ion with a charge controller.

There is no hard and fast rule about how many "extra"miles you get. But every seal, moving part, and wearable component will wear out faster.

The reason you don't get a scientific answer is because that's just not possible.

Wear out HOW much faster, are we talking 1% faster? 10% faster... etc.

The difference between replacing a wearable component at 100,000 km or 101,000 doesn't make a huge difference (ignoring the fact that it could just fail earlier due to one of a hundred different environmental reasons)

> I've been told that it's not anymore, but that comes from salesmen.

The owner's manuals still recommend a break in period. Modern synthetic oils and manufacturing tolerances reduce the need to be sure, but there's still a whole bunch of parts built at different plants that have never really worked together before. A bit of controlled wear still makes sense to me.

https://www.bmw.com/en/automotive-life/break-in-a-new-car.ht....

Stay under 90mph for the first 1300miles (lol that's 2000km), and for tires and breaks, it's good to let someone else drive for you and take the risk of not yet fully functional components.

Break-in is still relevant. The reason is to 1) let all the moving parts wear down evenly to a stable state and 2) let chemistry changes take place in lubricants and fluids. Things like belted teeth, gear teeth, sleeves, bearings, wheel grease, bearing grease, and more have metal-on-metal action where micro-burrs and such will get shaved down. Fluids will gas-off micro-pockets of air and so on.

Anyone that has done car work knows that if you run a magnet through used oil or look closely at used grease that it will be full of tiny tiny metal shavings from this action. It is just more intense during the first hundred or so miles.

EVs should greatly reduce the need, but there are still moving parts in wheels and sometimes gears.

> What do you do in the first 100 miles in your new car...

Drive it. Because it's MINE. New cars should only have a few miles on it for on/offloading it, etc.

Questions like this have the same stink as victim blaming questions.

It's less than 0.1% of the vehicle lifetime. The car doesn't even work properly for the first few hundred miles.

It's not YOURS until you buy it. And it's a vehicle, not a figurine in a vaccuum glass case.

I take excellent care of it, mechanically and cosmetically. A scratch in the first 100 miles is there forever... I even demand the dealer NOT wash the car as they are likely to put micro-scratches in the paint. Go look at the cars in carmax. The cheap cars tend to have very good paint, the high end European brands tend to have massive amounts of microscratches all over (presumably from their previous owners frequently taking it to a non-touchless car wash).

I sold a high performance sports car with 10,000 miles on it to Carmax a few years ago and the mechanic review said the car "looked and ran like it was brand new" and I was very happy with the price they offered.

For ICE cars, especially high performance sports cars, there is a lot to be concerned about non-owners doing in the first 100 miles.

You're probably not in the market for a work truck.

Most truck drivers aren't, to judge from the trucks I see on the road :)

Your experience is typical, but there are many exceptions.

If you buy a constrained car, or if there are fulfillment issues, sometimes cars will get traded between dealerships and be driven by a guy vs. transporting. I needed a very specific configuration of a work truck a few years ago that ended up being brought in from another city - it was new with 150 miles for that reason.

With Tesla, there's no dealers, but it seems to be a... chaotic company, so I'm sure there's lots of behind the scenes shifting.

Yeah, I've bought a vehicle with ~200 miles on it. But it was near the end of a model run and there were very few left. IIRC, it had been transferred, and also had been on the lot for a while.

It definitely shouldn't be the norm, but there are cases where it makes sense.

These are extremely early production units. Hopefully this means a higher than usual amount of testing on the test track before delivery.

I wouldn't personally want to buy one either, but mostly because of the potential issues with such early production. The actual miles don't bother me as much as that.

The frustrating thing is when you buy it at 13 miles, and pick it up at 53 miles. They prefer to show that car rather than put miles on their own vehicles.

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