A few years ago I was commissioned to write an article about private owners who had driven their vehicles for over a million miles. An important restriction was that they had to have done so on the original engine. If the engine had been rebuilt, that was okay, but if it had been replaced, it wasn’t.
This unfortunately eliminated the Greek taxi driver Grigorios Sahinidis, who covered nearly three million miles in his Mercedes 240D. He used it both for work and to make several hundred humanitarian trips into then war-torn Serbia, which is thoroughly admirable, but he went through several engines in the process, so he couldn’t be included.
That left eighteen vehicles, many of which had splendid stories. One I particularly liked concerned delivery driver Victor Sheppard, who reached the million in 2016 in a Toyota Tundra pickup he had bought nine years before. His friend Aaron Morvant did the same in another Tundra, achieving seven figures in 2019. Both Sheppard and Morvant had their vehicles serviced at Greg LeBlanc Toyota in Houma, Louisiana, which must therefore be the only dealership in the world to have worked on two million-mile Tundras.
Two of the million-milers drove Dodge Ram 2500s, though not of the same generation. One was owned by Donald Jensen, who (as Hugh and Tammy Pennington did with their similarly high-mileage Chevrolet Silverado) used it to deliver trailers. He got to a million miles in 2013 and is believed to have added a further seven hundred thousand over the next six years. I say ‘believed’ because this is only an estimate. That’s because by 2019 the Dodge’s mileometer had had to be replaced twice, which is to say that the least reliable part of his truck was the part which showed how reliable it was.
It wasn’t just about trucks, though. There was also an extraordinarily wide range of passenger vehicles including both a Porsche 356 and a Lincoln Town Car, which are perhaps being mentioned in the same sentence for the first time ever. But the cars themselves, I thought, were of only passing interest. What I found during my research was that, in the cases where their characters were apparent, I liked the people who drove them.
They were, as far as I could see, ordinary, undemonstrative folk, not seeking fame and not particularly impressed by what they had done. The extreme example was David Witte, a self-employed route mapper from Timonium, Maryland. When his 1994 Honda Accord reached one million miles on Route 340 in West Virginia in May 2001, he found the experience anticlimactic. He didn’t even like his job very much. Interviewed a few months later, he admitted that he was thinking of finding something else to do. “Driving around in a car all day doesn’t gain you a whole lot of respect.”
Joe LoCicero, a vehicle inspector unrelated to the actor of the same name as far as I know, also took an Accord to a million miles. I’ve watched an interview with him, and found him to be softly spoken but engaging. I hope he enjoyed his work more than David Witte did.
It may be that I’m imagining these people are nicer than they actually are, or, among those no longer with us, were. I don’t know, and I probably never will, because it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll ever meet them. I did, however, have an encounter of sorts with the most famous of them all.
This was Irv Gordon, who holds a world record for having driven more than three million miles in his Volvo 1800S. He bought it new on a Friday in June 1966, and returned it to the dealership for its scheduled fifteen hundred mile service the following Monday. When he reached his first million, Volvo gave him a 780 coupe, which he drove for four hundred and fifty thousand miles, and when he reached his third he was presented with an XC60. But he kept driving the 1800.
I wrote about him in 2007 after receiving a press release from Volvo which said that he had hit 2.6 million miles. This was an odd milestone, I thought, but I liked his story. To my great surprise, he contacted me a few weeks later, thanking me for what I had written. He knew about it because he had searched for himself online while visiting Kansas City, halfway through a round trip from his home twelve hundred miles away in New York state. There was no particular reason for him being in Kansas City. He had just wanted to go out for a drive.
We exchanged a few emails, and by the time our transatlantic conversation was over I had gained the impression that he was an American gentleman of a certain type: quiet, modest, respectful, but interesting. The sort of fellow a fellow would like to spend time with. He had been a teacher, and I wish I had had more teachers like him.
He once joked that he would be prepared to sell the car back to Volvo at a dollar for every mile he had driven it, no doubt knowing that Volvo would be amused but would decline the offer. I’m sure he never really wanted to sell it, and he never did.
“I expect I will still be driving the car until there is nothing left of me,” he said, and he was right. He died in November 2018, still the owner of the functional yet beautiful object he had loved for more than half a century.
All images copyright Volvo.
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