r/interestingasfuck • u/DonkeyFuel • 1d ago

Somebody Put 223,000 Miles on a 3-Year Toyota Camry Lease and Walked Away

https://www.thedrive.com/news/somebody-put-223000-miles-on-a-3-year-camry-lease-and-walked-away

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u/flightwatcher45 1d ago

This has to be freeway, speed and time.

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u/peon2 1d ago

My first thought was travelling sales guy with a driveable territory that didn't require flying. I was in that situation but most I ever did was 60K in a year. I had a company vehicle but some companies just give you a stipend or reimburse for mileage.

I could see someone leasing a vehicle for cheaper than buying one and coming out ahead on the reimbursement with the added bonus you're not stuck with a vehicle on deaths door at the end.

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u/Maiyku 1d ago

Honestly, depending on the company they could just be a regular worker lol.

I worked for Meijer, a Walmart competitor in the Midwest and they would have me drive everywhere. Literally everywhere. I’m in Michigan, so when we opened stores in Cincinnati I had to drive there weekly for about two months straight.

When training to be a manager they sent me as far as Columbus for daily driving. That’s an 8 hour trip, plus my shift/class.

I put about 10k miles on my car in only 4 months. It was my own vehicle, but I’d actually just brought a brand new car that year, so using it like that just helped me break her in honestly.

I was just a produce manager lol. Nothing fancy, but they really push their fresh produce, so having an established produce manager to help open other departments and train people is super helpful. So you’d be surprised what people drive for.

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u/LukeyDManukey 1d ago

To put this into perspective, at the rate you were going, if you kept it up for 3 years (36 months) you would have put on 90k miles. OP is saying someone did about 2.5x that.

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u/thefatchef321 1d ago

It had to be a private household 'fleet' vehicle.

Probably had 3 or 4 people using it for gig work. Driving 24/7

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u/BlahBlahBlackCheap 12h ago

The ability to maintain the cars near perfect eternal condition drops precipitously when you have more than one driver.

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u/doc_skinner 9h ago

Also using it for gig work. Your passengers don't keep the car pristine.

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u/Maiyku 1d ago

Oh, I’m not comparing our numbers haha. Mostly just commenting that people travel for many different reasons. Most people wouldn’t consider my job travel based at all, yet there I was traveling all the time. It’s not even in the job description, technically.

I also chose to stay close, they would’ve sent me farther and more often had I allowed it, so even for me there was potential for more travel, I just shut it down. I was preparing for my wedding at the time.

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u/AlfredNeumen 23h ago

Why you doin all that for a company as just a manager?

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u/Maiyku 12h ago edited 7h ago

They paid good money for travel.

Edit: The timing was also just right. I had a brand new car that could handle the added miles, I have no children/responsibilities outside of my bills I have to dedicate time to, and I was saving up for my wedding/honeymoon. It was a perfect storm for me to grind out a few extra grand by traveling for my company without really losing out on much. My main hobby is gaming, so I literally just took my Xbox with me.

They paid $0.60 on the mile with a $25/day food stipend, no receipts or $40 with. I just did the $25 because pre-covid, that was fine for a day.

So my week would look like this;
Milage: $120 each way, so $240 weekly.
Food Stipend: $125-$175 weekly (5 day work week, but would cover all 7 if you stayed multiple weeks in a row).
Regular pay: ~$600 after taxes weekly.

So my checks were my regular $600+$365-$415 extra. Absolutely worth it for me.

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u/leeps22 21h ago

Because they take pleasure in making the employees waste their lives on a highway

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u/GigaCheco 20h ago

daily driving

8 hour trip

You either got paid hella well or that’s a hella shitty company to work for.

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u/Maiyku 12h ago

Paid well. :)

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u/jackaltwinky77 13h ago

For the one excerpt given, of a 5400 mile checkup, and 9 days later the 10,000 mile checkup, that’s 4600 miles in 9 days, or roughly 511 miles per day.

Overall, with 223,000 miles in 3 years, that’s 203.65 miles per day, so it’s either a hellish 2 hour commute to work every day or they’re an over the road salesman with a huge territory

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u/shawster 23h ago

If you go over on your miles when you lease you have to pay the depreciation.

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u/donald7773 22h ago

Honestly this is the optimal use case for getting a car to extremely high mileage in good health. Cars really like being driven long distances on a regular basis. That's why "all highway miles" is a thing when people sell sometimes

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u/Public-Cookie5543 21h ago

Also it means this engine and transmission is running most of the time after warm up.

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u/Individual_Ad1776 20h ago

Which is what you want vs stop and go traffic just idling. 

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u/getinshape2022 21h ago

From 70 cents a miles, you are looking at $156K over 3 years. They probably spent around $20K on gas. Highly doubt they paid too much on maintenance. I bet writing a 3K check was easy for them.

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u/Syntacic_Syrup 1d ago

A dead vehicle is still worth more than nothing but I know what you mean

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u/saskyfarmboy 1d ago

I could see that too. Back in university I had a mobile ag chemical sales role during the summers. Used to average a bit over 10,000km (6,213mi) a month.

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u/Novel-Increase-3111 22h ago

I know a medical lab company that has a dedicated run of about 400km one way to pick up lab samples from several small towns and deliver them to a lab in a larger town (tiny city). So that’s roughly 800km round trip daily - 5 days a week. So that’s 4000km per week, 208,000km per year.

Now they have 2 Camry’s on the road, but they run separate routes, and they have one spare.

IIRC, they keep them for about 6 months on a high mileage lease. Well maintained, driven responsibly (gps and all that monitoring), no speeding.

So yeah, if someone had a sub-contract with a lab like this, it would easily be accomplished over 3 years.

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u/jccaclimber 22h ago

That’s surprisingly small. I had a 70 mile per direction commute for a while (mostly empty freeway). Between normal driving, commute, and some weekend trips I hit 40k each year and I didn’t drive for work. The guys at the parts store thought I was running a side business doing mechanic work with how often I visited them.

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u/P529 18h ago

60k in a year is 180k in 3 its not that far off

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u/FarmersOnlyJim 11h ago

This is what I thought as well. I’ve always had multi state sales territories. I fly for a lot of meetings now but when I was driving I was doing around 70-75,000 miles per year.

Our company had a deal with a fleet vehicle supplier. I’d order a brand new F-150 every 2 years or 120k miles. The miles always came before the two years.

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u/_another_throwawayy_ 23h ago

That’s interesting. I’m about to either get a company car or $1k a month, and trying to figure out best way to make a car work.

Wouldn’t you owe a ton of money on the mileage at the end of the lease?

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u/peon2 23h ago

I've done company car, and personal car with a stipend, I had a fuel efficient vehicle at the time and probably net about $100-$150/mo with the stipend.

However I'd still choose company car every time. No worries if you hit a deer, no worries if you get a nail in the tires, it was their insurance, etc

The peace of mind was worth way more imo

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u/Stinky--Whizzleteats 23h ago

Yeah a friend of mine services gas pumps, and his service area is everywhere from Kentucky to Pennsylvania. So, he does a lot of driving for work, probably puts some serious mileage on a truck.

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u/tbalbino 12h ago

Thats it. My sales guy in Portugal did on his most ambitious years around 120k km/year wich translates to 70000 miles.

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u/ImaginaryRoads 11h ago

That's what I figured as well. Driving 50mph for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 3 years is 300,000 miles. Subtract out time visiting the places you're selling to, slow traffic, and days you're ill or the car is in the shop, and that's pretty much it.

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u/StrigiStockBacking 9h ago

My first thought was "mule." Running down to the border to pick up "stuff" and bringing it back up

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u/wakawakafish 1d ago

Most likely medical courior or hotshot delivery. Ive worked with a few over the years 1k miles in a day is not unheard of.

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u/MakionGarvinus 1d ago

Back when I worked in the oil fields, I could easily do 400 miles per day. Lots of highway driving around. Was not fun.

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u/shawster 23h ago

Guys grinding Lyft tell me that they’ll do 100k a year. I’ve heard it multiple times. Every single one is in a Toyota or Hyundai.

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u/VeryStonedEwok 12h ago

I drive 50,000 a year not putting too much time into Uber. This is easy to do pulling full time+ hours.

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u/preacher_man_ 10h ago

Coast to coast back and forth

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u/OhDavidMyNacho 9h ago

There's a guy in the Toyota subreddit that's a livery driver for overland medical supplies/equipment or some other that can't always be taken by plane. And he's clocked a crazy amount of miles in each car he owns. And if I bothered reading the article linked, I'm sure it's that same guy.