Does mileage matter?

‘ONE owner, low mileage’. Buyers have always been happy to pay extra for a car that has done relatively few miles, ever since cars were first fitted with a device to record the total mileage travelled. Prior to that I suspect low-mileage horses were much in demand.

There is a certain amount to be said for buying a vehicle that has not done a huge amount of work. Quite apart from the engine and drivetrain, smaller items such as switches, hinges, door latches and controls all wear with use, and on a high-mileage vehicle quite a lot of components will be well past their design life. I had a Series III in for servicing a while ago where the foot pad on the clutch pedal had worn so thin with 40 years of gear changes that it had bent over on one corner.

Ultra-low-mileage vehicles (those with only a few thousand or even a few hundred miles on the clock) tend to end up with collectors, kept in dehumidified, heated garages as an investment. If you pay a huge premium for a 40-year-old vehicle that has only done 800 miles from new, you can’t really drive it anywhere without destroying the thing that