So what is the deal with this lifetime revs readout? What does the number relate to? Thanks

 

It's the total number of revulations (times 10,000) that your motor has ever made while running. It's basically a counter of how many times your engine has turned.

It's an indication of engine use separate from distance. Driving at high speed in low gears will generate more lifetime revs than highway overdrive cruising, for example.

Also idling will increase lifetime revs while your odometer would not change at all.

You could also do some math to determine average revs/mile, which would tell you a bit about how the vehicle experienced those miles. If you were averaging 1200 rpm per mile it was likely a highway cruiser. If you averaged 3500 per mile it was probably a track car!

Back of the napkin - your car has average 1429rpm during it's life.

Hope that helps!

 

Cool information, guess I better put my foot in it more and get those revs up!!

 

I had the same thing in my 58. Pretty cool for something 60 years ago.

 

Really? A rev counter or hour meter? I've seen hour meters on older stuff, but never a rev-counter. 1958 what?

 

An actual rev "counter". It rounded up the number of revs, I believe, by a thousand. I think I still have the gauge with some other pieces from the 58; from when I started to refurb it years ago (boy, was that a huge fail).

1958 Corvette, 283, 4 barrel, stick of course.

 

The patent for the tachometer was filed in 1937. So counting engine revolutions had been around easily 20 years prior. Then they took that number of rotations and figured out how quickly the engine had to spin at the microsecond interval to create RPM. That's how we determine realtime RPM without waiting a minute to calculate.

The problem is the number can get ridiculously high, and loses its value quickly. Then people come to forums trying to figure it out. https://www.corvetteforum.com/forums...es/cheers2.gif

Currently the best method to determine engine wear is the odometer, which tells you nothing more than how far the vehicle has travelled. It does not tell you ANYTHING about how the engine was used.

One can sit in Neutral and redline the engine for seconds, minutes or even hours... and nothing detects this abuse. This is a MAJOR problem. That means two cars with 10k miles ARE NOT the same. I credit Chevy for trying to establish a better method.

At 800 RPM, an engine rotates about 13 times a second, but @ 6000 RPM, the engine rotates 100 times a second! We need a way to figure out when this extra wear and tear has happened.

Average RPM is okay. But Average RPM can be manipulated. The logic is... If you run it at high RPM for a period of time, and then let the car idle for the same amount of time, you will ultimately reduce your average RPM in half. But did we actually reduce the wear on the engine by half? No.

Average RPM not only is inaccurate but also potentially encourages adding more engine wear in an attempt to offset the ratio.

THE SOLUTION:

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.

 

It's probably there as well to help detect fraud...like odometer tampering...

 

You could tamper a long way (cutting mileage in half or more) before it became really evident in wacky ratio, but that's something to watch for 40 years from now at Barrett Jackson :-)

 

Am i driving miss daisy?

 

i can't wait to check mine, I use my car only for drag racing. Lol.

 

I use it to find my average RPM is 4170.

 

If I take my miles (25710) and divide by the number of engine hours (307.8) that equals an average of 84mph. Seems fast to me. I only drive 55. And very few highway miles, mostly city. And I idle a lot, I mean a lot.

 

Bet sometime down the road "avg revs" becomes some type of sales pitch in for sale ads. Yup leave em parked everyone

 

The problem is you just don't know how or when it all happened.

 

Your analysis is correct. Something is seriously wrong there. My guess is perhaps the hours is not accurate. (scary) I also do not think your average RPM is correct either.

However the formula you are using I would say is not useful anyways.

Thats like a horrible math question... if i run the engine for this long and travel this many miles, how fast was car 1 going? This is the ol Rate x Time = Distance.

The best way to make sense which is accurate, is to take your total engine revolutions and divide by the distance traveled.

What we are trying to figure out... if two cars travel the same distance, how can you tell the difference between a car used gently, and another abused?

Yes, time could tell you something... but is it not possible one person could drive 30mph 2000 RPM and catch all green lights, and for another person to hit every red light, and race from light to light arriving close to the same time? But how are we going to figure out all those extra RPMs?

Counting engine revolutions and dividing by distance traveled is the answer. If one care does 6000 RPM for one mile, and another only 2000 RPM, we can clearly see that the car driven at 6000RPM for one mile with an average of 6000 engine revolutions per mile has 3x the engine wear as the car with 2000 engine revolutions per mile. Time is not going to affect this number. Racing for one minute and idling for 9 minutes will average out to seem like normal driving for 10 minutes.

So for you, your numbers are 77,030,000 engine revolutions divided by 25,710 miles which gives you 2996 average engine revolutions per mile.

It's a little high... but not 4170. I would not touch a car with 4170.

Let me ask you, did you buy the car new? Also, have you ever had transmission trouble? Do you drive with your overdrive off? Is your idle high?

 

For a corvette your numbers are good.

9,810,000 Engine Revolutions divided by 4009 Miles is 2446 Average Engine Revolutions per Mile.

 

I hope so... they are so important.

I have attached graphs showing how valuable this information is. RPM displayed on left. Speed displayed on right. Distance is on bottom. One example shows what normal driving looks like, one example shows how idling averages out quickly, one example shows moderate racing, and the last chart shows burnouts, over revving, drop shifting, downshifting and other driving actions that could be considered abusive putting the ARM to a ridiculous number. No one wants to buy that car!

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

 

I purchased the car new. It is an automatic. I drive it hard, I am the first guy at the next light.

 

Yep, same here. I also average very close to what you do... Or... a little more...