Seemingly Stupid But Valid Question--Why Odometers Rather Than Hour Meters?

can be equated from average mileage which is 10 thousand here for your average family car .

That is an interesting observation as well. Way back in the day, it was considered to be "average" 12K miles per year, then in the 80's and 90's it went to 15K miles per year,, and now it is down to 10K miles per year on the "average" vehicle.

Many of the new car lease advertisements are for "low mileage" leases at 6K miles per year (or even less)--and a lot of "millenials" are just not buying cars and driving at all--choosing to ppt for public transportation or ride-sharing services.
 
Well, with the bulk of new cars having "service reminder" warning lights on the dash telling you when to head back to the dealer for scheduled maintenance, an hour meter tied into the computer system would work just fine. Most idiots with new cars only know how to start it and where to put in gas. Hell, my one employee's wife probably doesn't even know where to put in gas because he fills her car up once a week for her.
It's not that uncommon at least on European cars for it to be somewhat adaptive. Usually there's a time interval regardless if it's running or not* for some things and also the mileage changes depending on how you drive the car. On BMW:s with iDrive you can check different intervals with dates and all for when it thinks you should change for example the brake fluid.

*Even something like a Volvo 850 från the middle of the 90's has that. On those it's one year, but I think it went to 2 years on the (first) Volvo S80 as well as to 20000 km instead of 15000 km. This on vehicles sold over here. How they were programmed in the US I don't know.
 
That too is interesting--I wonder if engine performance does indeed be adversely affected by failing caps in the ECM module. Even if it doesn't throw an error code, is it really performing as it should? IDK--a question for the more knowedgeable, perhaps?

Probably depends on what the caps do. I can imagine if they are used for supply filtering that if they were not doing their job, the sensor data or whatever could be "dirty" and give false data. My interest was mostly preventative repairs, I didn't want to ignore it until the goo spread enough to rot a leg off a chip.
 
Police cars and such sometimes have hour meters for maintenance reasons for exactly the reasons gensets do. Newer vehicles often have an hour counter in the information display someplace if you cycle through. A fancypants scanner can pull it if not.

As for the wear thing based on driving, thats where the oil life monitor comes into play. The computer will tell you when the oil needs to be done based on time, mileage, and driving conditions rather than just run time or miles driven.

On Police Vehicles, they spend a lot of idle hours in daily use. Which makes an hour meter sensible for them, as part of the factored in maintenance.
 
The Crown Vic Interceptors have hour meters in the cluster, we still do maintenance based on mileage because that's what matters to things like brakes, tires and drivetrain.

I've seen some Vics with 80,000 miles and 11,000+ hours on the clock, I think the highest I saw was 12,000+ hours.
11,000 hours translates to about 300,000+ miles on a regular vehicle, but these run 24 hours a day in some cases and are left running even when they're not being driven.

At 11k hours they are usually burning a lot of oil and the timing chains are starting to rattle.
 
Shouldn't be hard or more expensive with today's technology to make both available. $10 says there is some massed produced personal vehicle, right now, that has an "odometer chip" already installed that can easily be hacked to also show run time.
 
Here is a sub-seemimgly stupid question. I seem to remember on an old farm tractor that the hour meter was dependent on the RPM. The higher the RPM, the faster the hour meter went. Is that correct?
 
Should have both, hour meter and odometer.
In my opinion.

Many recent cars do have both, at least for engine oil, The most important maintenance item impacted by excessive hours. The oil life monitor program on my 2012 GMC Terrain takes into account Hours, Distance, Temperature and perhaps dealership ship profits from this service.
 
Many recent cars do have both, at least for engine oil, The most important maintenance item impacted by excessive hours. The oil life monitor program on my 2012 GMC Terrain takes into account Hours, Distance, Temperature and perhaps dealership ship profits from this service.

Right. My 2011 Honda Civic will say "Remaining oil life xx%" I always assumed that was just based on mileage.
 
Here ya go kids, knock yourselfs out:
2PAR6_AS01


https://www.grainger.com/product/2P...s_kwcid=AL!2966!3!50916809157!!!g!81032183397!
 
Back
Top Bottom