Hour meter on a car.

s14driftking

I noticed the Passat has a hour meter for the amount of time the car has being running. One meter resets every 100 hours and the other resets ever two hours I think if the car hasn't being drove. Is there any way to find out the total no of hours on the car or engine?

TrailerBob

Interesting idea. I can't help you with the question, but I wonder should it be something cars have. It's the way all machinery is recorded as distance travelled is irrelevant on a tractor or digger. But with cars in urban areas, they could be sitting in traffic for a long time, while the engine still runs. Maybe stop-start will get rid of it somewhat.

Just a thought

CiniO

TrailerBob wrote: »

Interesting idea. I can't help you with the question, but I wonder should it be something cars have. It's the way all machinery is recorded as distance travelled is irrelevant on a tractor or digger. But with cars in urban areas, they could be sitting in traffic for a long time, while the engine still runs. Maybe stop-start will get rid of it somewhat.

Just a thought

But still having spend 1000 hours in city traffic doing mostly between 1000rpm and 2500rpm is bit different than spending 1000 hours on motorway doing 5000rpm at 200km/h.

TrailerBob

That's exactly my point, if you knew the hours and the mileage, you'd have a fair idea what type of driving the car was doing (on average) and not go with the 'one lady owner, only used it for going to mass' type of line on donedeal

CiniO

TrailerBob wrote: »

That's exactly my point, if you knew the hours and the mileage, you'd have a fair idea what type of driving the car was doing (on average) and not go with the 'one lady owner, only used it for going to mass' type of line on donedeal

That's actually true.
Hour meter with mileage odometer looked up together will give a good indication of previous use of car (obviously if not clocked).

P.S There's nothing putting me more off any car advert than "one lady owner"... Usually it means that no one cared for the car at all.

Esel

Dublin city drivers should talk about GPH (gallons per hour) instead of MPG...

Del2005

They'd just adjust another meter when selling. A properly maintained vehicle doesn't care how or where it's used, it doesn't care if it's doing 200km/h or 0km/h for 10 hours, it still requires the operator to monitor the gauges. Even then you can't tell if the driver goes into top gear at 1000rpm or 7000rpm.

Nekarsulm

If you could decide on an average speed per hour of operation, you could come up with a notional engine running time. Taking an average speed per hour of 25 mph, my 150,000 mile passat would have about 6000 hours on the clock.
Most diesel engines would be expected to reach at least 10,000 hours before mechanical intervention, so the Passat should see 250,000 easily.
Ironically, the drive to lower emissions has resulted in much more troublesome ancillary components on diesel engines cars.