Its rare that we see a new vehicle in my career field because we drive the heck out of them. While the mileage is never high, the vehicles have seen many hours of use.
When I was in Korea we had an ‘85 Chevy truck with 140k miles. Black smoke poured from the exhaust, the battery wouldn’t hold enough charge to run the 4 ways for more than three minutes, the heaters didn’t work, and it was beaten to living hell. We drove that truck everywhere because it was the only one we had. After we had sent it to motor pool for the 20th time to get fixed, they finally decided to replace it. They gave us a brand new truck - I never thought we would ever have a new truck - and I was right. By the end of the day the commander caught wind of it and took our truck and gave us his old model. We ended up ahead in the end but I thought it was a bit messed up that he did that…. Trizinsky was his name. Anyhow… two weeks later we saw the truck that we thought had gone to the scrap yard - and it was being driven by Civil Engineering. I guess they upgraded too - I don’t want to know what they had.
Our current shop truck is a ‘98 Chevy with 99k miles on it. The drive to work is only 4 miles so we aren’t going far in it but we are making quite a few trips ~13000 or so. I’m guessing that most of us don’t take any of our vehicles on that many trips regardless of how many miles we put on it because we tend to go longer distances. This truck has been beaten to living hell. In fact, we drove it till the doors fell off - literally. Since I’ve been here we’ve had problems with the doors. At first, we the latch broke off the inside of one of the doors. Soon after, the mechanism in two of the other doors broke leaving us with one working door. Sure, we could get out of the drivers door and open the rest from the exterior but in an emergency would we really want to do that? We turned it in for repair and two weeks later it came back with 3/4 working doors. Oh well, at least it was an improvement. Most of the doors shut poorly - probably due to wear and tear. Yesterday the door did finally did tear - off its hinges.
Would anyone in the civilian sector think of driving a vehicle as beaten as this? Probably not - it still serves its purpose when the doors are attached and we’ll probably drive it until the engine seizes - I give it another year or two. I’m glad we have a truck - it could be worse - we could be stuck with nothing to drive but buses and forklifts.
Tags: miles, military
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