Longest you’ve seen someone go on a set of spark plugs

My dear wife when I met her :)

She was driving a self maintained oil change and air filter 1996 Honda Civic bought new. Finally in 2004 it had a check engine light at 149k miles and was randomly stalling. She never changed the plugs, timing belt nothing.

Honda had some sort of possibly punitive EPA recall because they replaced her cat convertor, o2 sensors, and original spark plugs/cap/rotor and air filter for nothing! I believe the bill showed about $2400 but then $50 for an exhaust part not covered.

She drove on till 2005 and bought her Subaru. She never changed the timing belt.
 
My dear wife when I met her :)

She was driving a self maintained oil change and air filter 1996 Honda Civic bought new. Finally in 2004 it had a check engine light at 149k miles and was randomly stalling. She never changed the plugs, timing belt nothing.

Honda had some sort of possibly punitive EPA recall because they replaced her cat convertor, o2 sensors, and original spark plugs/cap/rotor and air filter for nothing! I believe the bill showed about $2400 but then $50 for an exhaust part not covered.

She drove on till 2005 and bought her Subaru. She never changed the timing belt.
My dear wife, before we were married bought a new Mazda Protege...and I thought, ok, I guess we’ll have this thing for a long time. 8 months later the thing had 14,000 miles on it and I asked her...where do you take this thing for oil changes, and she said, what’s that?

Traded it in a few months later.
 
cousin had a 2000 Outback with 240k miles on it whne he called me to look at the way it was running. checked a few things and pulled the plugs. out of 4 plugs , 2 had no electrode left. i asked him if he ever changed it and he said" they need to be changed? " LOL

bought a set of plugs and installed them and it ran like new. Car was stolen a few months later .
 
I've seen many go over 200,000 miles on a set of plugs. "It still runs fine." LOL Wait until one or more coils dies, and it costs more than 2 sets of new plugs would cost. Not to mention the risk of plug threads seizing into the cylinder head from staying in there so long.
 
I've seen many go over 200,000 miles on a set of plugs. "It still runs fine." LOL Wait until one or more coils dies, and it costs more than 2 sets of new plugs would cost. Not to mention the risk of plug threads seizing into the cylinder head from staying in there so long.
Well you have a point here...too much plug gap will tax the coil to the point of failure, but in all honesty coils aren't all that expensive on most cars anyway. So that person that does make it to 200k on a set of plugs, that maybe is forced to do a few coils? For one thing at that mileage they very well may have to replace a coil or two anyway...for another, they did basically skip a tune up along the way.

Would I push plugs to 200,000 miles? No way. Then again I'm proactive with all my maintenance.
 
Had an early 2000s Mercedes ML 320 come in with a bad misfire, had 186k with the original spark plugs.

A repeat customer brought me a 2003 Highlander, 1MZ-FE with 292,000 on the original timing belt. I suggested replacing the spark plugs while in there and they agreed, customer bought the car new and said the plugs were original. The plugs were OE parts, but so were the replacements I put in. They didn't look that bad and the car ran great. It's possible they were original, but I'm thinking they were replaced once before and the customer either didn't know or forgot.
 
I had a co-worker who did her own maintenance on an early-'90s Jeep, 4-cylinder with a 5-speed manual transmission. (For you Jeep fans, it had rectangular headlights, so that might narrow down the year.) She lived well out of town, and so put on lots of easy miles.

When the Jeep was perhaps five or six years old, she brought in a set of four very worn spark plugs. They were the originals, with 262,000 km on them (around 160,000 miles). They were very dirty and had huge gaps.

She was so proud of having gotten that sort of mileage out of them, and was not the sort of person one could debate these things with. My inner voice was saying something like "Yeah, but how much extra did it cost you in fuel to defer spending $10 or $15 on new plugs?"
 
Well you have a point here...too much plug gap will tax the coil to the point of failure, but in all honesty coils aren't all that expensive on most cars anyway. So that person that does make it to 200k on a set of plugs, that maybe is forced to do a few coils? For one thing at that mileage they very well may have to replace a coil or two anyway...for another, they did basically skip a tune up along the way.

Would I push plugs to 200,000 miles? No way. Then again I'm proactive with all my maintenance.


Don't know man... Coils on my car are $95 a piece... Times 6 that's $580... Plugs are way way cheaper at $9 to $15 a plug.

Change the plugs. Way cheaper vs having to change coils and plugs.
 
I did over 150K in my echo.
Same car as my co-workwer but I changed his original plugs at almost 300k kms. Amazing.
I also sold my 2003 Highlander with about 280k kms with the original plugs. As a matter of fact I hardly changed anything on that Highlander. Way better build quality than it's newer replacement, a Nissan.
 
Last edited:
Don't know man... Coils on my car are $95 a piece... Times 6 that's $580... Plugs are way way cheaper at $9 to $15 a plug.

Change the plugs. Way cheaper vs having to change coils and plugs.
Ok, for some reason I thought they were more around $40 bucks, but I was wrong...yeah, you’re right, at $95 a piece times 6 = $580. Change the spark plugs. Agree.
 
Same car as my co-workwer but I changed his original plugs at almost 300k kms. Amazing.
I also sold my 2003 Highlander with about 280k kms with the original plugs. As a matter of fact I hardly changed anything on that Highlander. Way better build quality than it's newer replacement, a Nissan.
I swear to god, those Highlanders and actually most things Toyota from 2000-2018 are ridiculous.

I have seen the most absurd abuse and neglect done to Highlanders. Things that are unspeakable, and yet you turn the key on these things and they fire right up and run like a sewing machine. I think it has a lot to do with who used to buy these things, and what they were used for. They were family haulers - neglected and abused family haulers - people that used them for one purpose and one purpose only...drive them right into the ground, with as little maintenance and cost as humanly possible.

Just changed the plugs on a Highlander - and I know this guy, it’s his wife’s car - and it was way way past due. The thing had bald tires, inside was a mess, brakes gone, oil hadn’t been changed in 12,000 miles, exterior looked like it hit everything but the lottery. And he says...this is nothing, I guarantee you’ll find petrified Cheerios and sippy cups melted into the back seat carpet. Lol. And this thing had to have cost him $40,000 grand new.
 
I took really good care of mine but it was time to go in 2019 when the undercarriage started showing it's age due to our winters; the A/C still worked too. My Nissan's A/C stopped working again! :mad:
 
I had a Ford Winstar come into the dealership that had a CEL on. It had 220K miles on the original plugs and the tech next to me replaced the plugs before trying to fix the CEL. Turns out the CEL was on because of a vacuum leak.
Oh yeah, I remember those Windstar vacuum leaks. Intake manifold gaskets. Big problem with those things!
 
Oh yeah, I remember those Windstar vacuum leaks. Intake manifold gaskets. Big problem with those things!
I did some work on my friend's Windstar about 10 years ago. While researching the vehicle's problems, I stumbled upon a Windstar forum. One of the veteran posters had included in his signature something like "If the check-engine light's not on, it's not a real Windstar!"

That pretty much said it all.
 
I went 149K on my LS1 F-body, and it never lost any measurably performance or mpg. My Dad's 438K mile old work van, I will ask if he ever changed the plugs, lol!
 
I did some work on my friend's Windstar about 10 years ago. While researching the vehicle's problems, I stumbled upon a Windstar forum. One of the veteran posters had included in his signature something like "If the check-engine light's not on, it's not a real Windstar!"

That pretty much said it all.
My Grandparents bought one years ago and didn't get GAP, and they got TAKEN! Oddly I don't remember any issues out of the thing, but I kept hoping t hey never got into a fender bender.
 
Back
Top