Miles per engine hour

[TaylorH]

Had an interesting problem at work and I'm trying to get some data. The government considers one hour of engine operation ='s 35 miles traveled for their road capable vechicals. We where trying to see if that metric was close to what we were seeing in our personal cars. Does anyone else have an engine hour clock on their cars?
My Suburban has 105,753 miles at 1,805.9 hours of engine operation, which = 58.6 miles per hour of engine operation.

 

[TBULL]

It would depend a lot on the terrain and average vehicle speed. If you do a lot of short thrips on slow speed rural roads, the your engine hours per mile would be lower than someone traveling interstate at 70 or 80 all the time. The goverment grab a statistic from one and tries to apply to all or at least too many in my opinion, but hey that works for a lot of things for budgets.

 

[Tim M]

Sooo, if you sat in one spot for an hour, then drove for 1 mile......

 

[Tony_G]

So if you drove all those 105,753 you would have spent 75 days in the car. And yet we build cars to go drive more.

 

[Richgrsc]

The one thing to remember, government vehicles do a lot of setting in one place doing nothing. The public drive to get someplace, often in a hurry. You 58 mile is a lot more realistic.

 

[Kerry & Kathy]

I owned a 1 ton 75 Dodge High Top Ambulance that I bought in 1982 for only $1500. It allegedly had been used by the City of Des Peres to remove the bodies from the Pope Cafeteria murders and the city could not find a buyer.
It had an hour meter installed with a lot of additional gear that included dual batteries, HD lighting, and external speakers. They kept a log of operations that showed it had 3790.2 hours of operation in 47,334 miles when I bought it.
It was obvious that the ambulance and seen a lot of idle time as the seats were worn out and the driver's door had the paint worn off on the top of the driver's window sill where someone had rested their arm for many hours.

I put new seats in it, installed an RV cam with intake and 600 cfm Holly, modified the back interior with tie downs and used it to haul my Funnybike to races all over the country.
But at the time I bought it...the van had traveled only 12.49 miles per hour of operation. When I owned it that number would have been MUCH higher as it saw a lot of long highways miles at 5-20 over the posted speed limit.
When I sold it the van had 127,000 miles but I didn't record the hours.

The point is that there will be some vehicles that may have very low miles/hour if it sits idling for long periods such as Police Cars and ambulances.
While company cars of a salesman covering a large geographical area and traveling primarily interstate highways might have a mile/hour approaching 100.

As Dan noted...it is dependent on vehicle use.