Clocked up 100,000 Miles in the Forester

On my last trip to site my odometer clicked over 160,000 kilometres, which is 100,000 miles in real measurements. I think this is only the third car where I have clicked over 100,000 miles.

I did well over 100,000 miles in my first car which was a 1.3 litre hot orange two door Ford Escort GT with a dual-throat factory-fitted Webber carburettor (back when it was ‘cool’ to have a dual-throat Webber). From memory I did very close to 200,000 miles in that car—something like about 185,000 as I recall (which would be almost 300,000 kilometres).

Back in those days I lived in the country and I did a serious heap of driving. Every weekend I would use up a tank of juice. It helped that petrol back then was something like 25c a gallon (i.e., about 5.5c a litre). It helped further that I worked for a mining company that allowed their staff to buy petrol at their negotiated discount rate from the local Mobil outlet (it went on an account and was taken out of your pay at the end of the month). It helped even further that my father and his brother owned the local store which had a petrol pump (which proved very useful in emergencies when everyone else in town was closed).

So when you work out the cost of petrol for 185,000 miles back in those days it comes out to somewhere around $1,650—seriously it does; for the whole 185,000 miles. Here in 2012 it would cost about $44,300 for that same amount of fuel!

But since that first car, and probably the next car after that—which from memory was a 2.0 litre Ford Cortina—I have more or less changed my cars every three or four years. Either because I was single and had the cash or because I was on Senior Staff with the company I was working for and they had vehicle purchasing plans that allowed me to do it.

But now I am a ‘lowly bottom-feeder contractor’ with a non-working wife and a stay-at-home son. I have had a 2005 Forester for some time now (since about 2005).

So I guess there is a good chance I am going to see 200,000 kilometres click over in this car in the not too distant future.

Fortunately it is a Subaru which are rated the 5th most reliable cars in the world by What Car after Honda, Toyota, Lexus (which is really Toyota anyway), and Suzuki.