Engine hours.

[backwoodsman]

I'm sure there is a method to get a rough estimation, but I have no idea what it is.

If a car has 150,000 miles on the clock, roughly what sort of hours would be on the engine, lets assume it's not been left idling for hours, and all hours were spent moving.

[The Vambo]

Piece of string really.

Could have been used primarily to commute through London at an average of 17 mph or as a repmobile averaging 60 mph up and down the M74.

Without some more info any guess could quite easily be out by 50%.

[Cambio]

Well, if the average speed over those 150,000 miles was 40mph, then that would be 3750 hours.

[backwoodsman]

The car is a Discovery, living in a rural area, with B, and unclassified roads.

I know it's not precise, just trying to get an idea.

[russy01]

Could be anything pal. Theoretically it could be as little as 600hrs (Veyron at 250mph continuously).

With my mixed bag of driving my car's avg speed is 32mph, so you could say 150k on that basis would be 4700hrs (195days).
Then you could say that the avg driver does 12k PA, so 150k miles would take 12.5yrs. So over the 12.5yrs you'd have spent approx 4% that time driving.

[hidetheelephants]

I'd equate 250hrs(usual service interval for road vehicle sized industrial engines) to 6k as that used to be the usual service interval for cars; that gives you 6250hrs. It's a pretty meaningless figure though, why do you need to know?

[ModernAndy]

As I'm sure many people know, farm machinery and various types of plant measure hours operated as this is a more meaningful measure of total use. It would actually be useful on cars in a sense because a car that's done 100k motorway speeds might be much more preferable to a car that's done 70k stop/start city driving.

[ging84]

if your car has a trip computer you can probably flick it to average speeds, which because it's basically a fking useless function it very rarely gets use or reset, it will give you a fairly good figure for your long term average speed, divide you mileage by it that is your answer

[Captain Cadillac]

Some American full sized pickups have hour meters in them. I've seen 50k mile trucks with more hours than 100k mile trucks.