what does "lifetime rpms X 10000" on the display mean? my small print owners manual does not address this, that I have been able to find.

 

It's how many times the engine has revolved since it was created and installed. It Is designed to measure how hard the car has been driven. It is a better measure of use versus simple mileage .

 

Babaron is correct.

If you take your total engine revolutions and divided by distance traveled, now you get average revolutions per Mile. This is a better metric, because in the above example, you can idle it for as long as you want... the average engine revolutions per mile will only go up because the car is not adding more distance.

Example:
6000 RPM x 1 minute = 6000 Engine Revolutions
6000 Engine Revolutions / 1 Mile = 6000 Average Revolutions per Mile.

If we idle the car for 5 more minutes, at 800 RPM we get:
800 RPM x 5 minutes = 4000 Engine Revolutions
4000 Engine Revolutions + 6000 Engine Revolutions = 10,000 engine revolutions.

But since the car didn't move, 10,000 engine revolutions divided by 1 mile gives us 10,000 Average Revolutions per Mile. We can still see this engine has had extra wear and tear. The same applies to someone attempting to disconnect the Odometer. Without Miles being added to the ratio, the Average Revolutions continues to rise making it obvious that someone has tampered with the vehicle raising a red flag.

It would be nice if Chevy would calculate this for us so we could quickly know the difference between two vehicles side by side. The downfall is it is still just an overall representation. The ONLY way to REALLY know what has happened to an engine would be to record this information with timestamps, so it can be exported and displayed in a timeline history graph. Plus, since engine revolutions and distance traveled are recorded against Time, it's possible to determine speed by using the formula [Distance = Rate X Time] for any period of time in history.

Credit to http://kenometer.com for their research in this area.