I'll be 75 y/o in a few months. I think about it differently too. I drive it as often as I can making good use of the all season tires and don't worry about it going to the scrap heap before I do.

 

I am a strong believer in this too. What stuff should I be lubbing in the C8 beyond what the manual says for longevity? I already know about visible seals/rubber - but anything else?

 

Any car will go 500,000 miles if you are willing to put the $ in it to get there.

 

I have a 2024 Lexus ES350 F Sport and my wife drives a 2025 BMW X5. My son-in-law, a former Lexus mechanic and Service Advisor, has told me to get rid of both when their warranties expire. Why? Electronics. The Lexus six cylinder is almost indestructible if maintained properly. It's the electronics that will get an owner every time. I'm already chasing electrical gremlins in the Lexus!

Good luck!!!

 

I haven't stopped laughing since I read this.
Many purchase a car or truck loving it and claim to own it practically forever, however few ever do. Can't imagine a C8 lasting 250,000 miles much less 500,000.
Don't get me wrong I love my C8, however most of today's vehicles just aren't built to go past 150,000 miles or so.

Just as a point of reference: There are a few exceptions. Take this '96 Toyota Tacoma. As of next week I will have owned it 29 years and it has 416,000 trouble-free miles on it. It's never been back to a dealership since I initially drove it off the lot.
The C8 is nowhere near the durability and longevity of the Tacoma and I'm not even sure it will even make it to 500,000 miles.

 

Very impressive. You have obviously maintained the truck very well. The interior and paint look great. Well done!

 

As many have stated, the electronics and parts will be limiting factors. There are numerous C5’s out there that I’m aware of (one local) with hundreds of thousands of miles but finding parts is difficult I.e. the dreaded EBCM on 97-99 years.

 

I disagree that electronics will doom C8 corvettes in the future. That is the advantage of high volume cars. If a car has a rare problem the parts will be available used. If it is a common problem then there will be enough of a market to justify repair or equivalent replacement parts. There was a Hagarty article a while back that showcased different repair houses. And "universal" chips are being developed so that a new module can perform the function of modules that use obsolete chips. And it isn't just electronics, mechanical parts can share the same fates. You may have to pay more for them than when they were available new but that is often the case with rare parts.

The C5 97-99 ECBM is an example. Yes, NOS can be hard to find but there are repair services:
https://www.speedofix.com/product/ch...epair-service/

And the price isn't that far out of line compared to what it costs for a new C8 brake module:
https://www.gmpartswarehouse.com/oem...wOKOrCCE&gQT=2

 

All depends on use, maintenance... and replacement parts availability. Aye, the later, there is the rub (or, may well prove to be).

 

@RKCRLR - here is the Hagerty article. It appears that some "mom and pop" shops are being established to replicate old electronics using new electronics.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/mainte...eath-sentence/

This is interesting to me because I had a 10+ year old HP All in One computer and started getting notices months ago from HP that they were no longer going to have parts available for it. I am typing this on my new HP All in One computer because of that. The chip in the old one was slow anyway so it was easy for me to justify a new computer. It also makes me wonder which less expensive cars won't be worth electronics repairs because they might cost more than the car is worth after just a few repairs.

 

Don’t listen to all these negative responses about getting 500k miles out of your C8. The only thing you have to be willing to do is pay to replace any and all the items that may fail before your odometer rolls that magic number. And if that price is cheaper than a new vehicle or two.😎

 

Do oil changes every 5,000 miles.

 

The Hagerty article is simplistic, and more applies to classics with simple circuit board repairs. Newer vehicles are another matter.

All valid points, but what’s being overlooked here is the fact that electronics can be rebuilt, be it with new internals, repaired circuits, or both.

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As applied to new vehicles the above statement is just incorrect; the elephant in the room are the complex deep-submicron chips that currently cannot be repaired (only replaced), and will likely not be able to be replaced in a couple of decades unless they're stockpiled. I repaired my EBCM myself and also repaired my dimming display; but these are easy repairs if you can solder and troubleshoot. Automotive chips are much more complex and are simulated and designed with predictive tools to last for 15 years, with 15-20 year supply chains planned. After that, the engineering teams that designed them have moved on to new applications, and virtually none of these teams will focus on 20-year-old legacy replacement chips as there's not enough return on investment, and the investment is huge.

Smaller companies that might attempt to replace something like an ADAS chip for example, which transfers Terabytes of data per second, with a generic box would quickly go bankrupt. There is currently no good answer for these lifetime questions unless major industry players can re-align to re-source these components at a possible break-even economic point, or even at a loss. And there's really no incentive to do so, at least at this time.

There is some drift towards standardization in automotive electronics, but it has a long way to go and these systems are only getting more complex.

https://semiengineering.com/why-chip...in-automotive/

 

I agree 100%. I owned a chain of auto parts stores for 16 years and as a result I can tell you for sure that as long a there's a buck to be made producing replacement electronic parts or repair solutions for older vehicles they will be available.

 

Take the C5’s EBCM, steering wheel position sensor, etc. and multiply it by 50+. The proprietary electronics in modern cars will make almost all of them garage/yard art in 25-30 years.

 

500K miles seems like a bit of a stretch. I put 304K on a Tacoma pickup truck over the course of 18 years with nothing more than preventative maintenance, one bearing in the front diff. and one driveshaft carrier bearing but I'm not sure about doing it in a Vette.

I know there are some high mileage cars out there already. My friend is a tech at a local dealer and they have seen some 2020's with over 100K but they are rare. From what he was saying, it seems like the main issue has been electrical issues and the DCT.

Honestly, the DCT is the only thing that scares me about the car and probably the reason I'll trade it as soon as it's out of warranty but I have many years left on the extended so that is a problem for another day.

My take on it is, stay on top of the maintenance. Do the fluid changes more often and inspect the car regularly and you should be good.

 

The "buck to be made" is the issue. As technology moves forward old technology won't be profitable to keep for users of old technology. The electronic repair solution for people who want to keep their cars for a long time is most likely a junkyard.

 

I can't imagine ever driving any single vehicle for 500K miles. My C8 is a toy car and it sits for half of every year because of our shitty salted, sanded (now graveled) and potholes to hell-filled winter roads. Even if I averaged high mile travel years every year it would take me over 100 years to put that many miles on it. I am going to say 500K is too far a stretch for something that is driven often enough to be put into less than ideal driving situations on a daily or even weekly basis. Things are going to break no matter how well you maintain it. More importantly in todays world of mostly brain dead completely careless drivers? It will likely be totaled before it ever reaches that milestone.

 

The C8 is not my toy car although we have 4 cars between me and my wife. So we have too many cars but I don’t feel like selling any of them and I do keep my cars for decades, hence the accumulation!. We won’t find two many C8s with many miles because 90% of us are using them as weekend cars plus a lot of us live in areas which are weather-challenging for our C8s. In a couple of years I’ll have more time (retirement) and I’ll definitely put more miles on my C8 than just 14-15k per year. We’ll see how the car will hold as I’ll continue with my aggressive maintenance schedule (probably going to adopt the 5k miles oil change schedule recommended by someone on this thread along with the more frequent transmission oil and filter replacement approach).