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What Constitutes A Thrashed Car?


aido
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Bit of a strange question but I was thinking about this earlier after reading about engines with carbbonisation etc.

What actually constitutes a thrashed car nowadays?

A lot of cars are high-revving, they're designed to be, so if they're designed like this, does that mean that driving high in the rev range isn't thrashing the car, as that's always what I'd been lead to believe?

Is it things like not letting the engine warm up / cool down etc, or not servicing the car correctly, or not doing motorway journeys enough to clear the crap out of the engine?

What about servicing? Does not having the car serviced mean that the car would be classed as thrashed?

What actually constitutes a thrashed car and what are the warning signs?

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to be honest, revving a car to the redline/limiter quite frequently would consitute 'thrashing' IMO - i mean, we all do it time to time, and thats okay - but if you did it everyday, or when the engines cold, then its thrashed..

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Bit of a strange question but I was thinking about this earlier after reading about engines with carbbonisation etc.

What actually constitutes a thrashed car nowadays?

A lot of cars are high-revving, they're designed to be, so if they're designed like this, does that mean that driving high in the rev range isn't thrashing the car, as that's always what I'd been lead to believe?

Is it things like not letting the engine warm up / cool down etc, or not servicing the car correctly, or not doing motorway journeys enough to clear the crap out of the engine?

What about servicing? Does not having the car serviced mean that the car would be classed as thrashed?

What actually constitutes a thrashed car and what are the warning signs?

What do you mean by thrashed? If a car is driven or maintained outside of the parameters it was designed for, then you're going to have reliability problems.

In saying that it depends on the limits of those parameters. I used to have a Lotus in the 80's (yea, I'm old), and that was definitely designed close to it's upper limit. That seemed to be Colin Chapman's philosophy, and part of the reliability equation was frequent maintenance and adherence to operation guidelines (rev over 2000 rpm before the engine was up to temperature and you could hear the cash leaving your wallet :blink: )

I guess most 'standard' cars are designed towards the bottom limit so it takes quite a lot of abuse to cause a problem, but any performance mods will take you nearer to, and in extreme cases outside of, the upper limit of design reliability so you need to take appropriate steps (mostly in the direction of your bank).

Look at F1 for an example of extreme engineering, engines and suspension design life of hours, not years.

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I'm with Tango on this one, I don't believe you can really thrash modern cars anymore. Yes when you stick on lots of performance mods, you're putting the engine under more stress than the manufacturer intended, but if a car is totally standard, I think you could happily rev it to the redline all day everyday, and it wouldn't really complain.

Even from cold, while I know this doesn't apply to manuals, my auto won't actually hold a gear over about 5k revs until the engine warms up a bit, so modern cars are now clever enough to ensure you can't mess them up however hard you try :D

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Thanks for the comments guys, it does sound like the opinion on thrashed motors has changed from what it used to be then - or at least in my understanding of it!

As for the service comments, that's always going to be a pain I guess, it's a shame they never had a central system like they're doing with MOT's now for servicing, that way it wouldn't matter if the car had been serviced by an independant garage or a main dealer, it would be registered in the system with details of what work was performed!

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Hi,

Id say any car thats had a few owners has been thrashed at some point in its life,ive heard stories of new cars being driven hard,being loaded/unloaded onto transporters on there way to the dealers :lol:

Where i used to work,behind our carpark was a exhaust/tyre place,there was waste land behind it.I used to see nearly all the customers cars that were left to have work done driven Very Hard around the back of there unit :whistling:

Theres not many garages that i trust to leave my car with ;)

Chips.

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Quick question regarding the number of owners of a vehicle, had a look on the RAC website earlier and it showed 5 owners on my car, would that figure include the Japanese owners, or would it purely be the people who have had the car in the UK?

Know what you mean though, I'll be leaving post-it notes in the car with the milage on from now on, don't want no bellend knackering my car!!!

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