Something I may never know the answer to, but I've been trying to pinpoint, is exactly how many miles my bus has seen on the road. Since the odometer doesn't exceed 100,000, I can only guess at how many times it's rolled over.
Fortunately, there are some clues.
The original VW warranty and maintenance booklet shows it was sold on February 13, 1979 at Southwest Volkswagen in Houston, TX. (Note: I was -6 months old.) It had 21 miles.
The next piece of paperwork I have is the original registration of Julio C. Rivera, who purchased it on 10/31/86. At that time, the odometer read 70,266. So it averaged about 10k a year its first 7 years on the road.
Next I have a service receipt from Northlake Service Center. It got a lot of services here. On 7/5/91 the mileage is printed as "100,000+" so it must have rolled over at some point between 1986 and 1991. If still he drove it 10k a year, it probably rolled over in 1989.
My next clue is another receipt from the same place on 10/15/93. The mileage is recorded as 44,017 which we can assume is 144,017. That's about 11,000 a year since 1989.
Finally another receipt on 10/24/94 shows 59,788. That's 15k since the previous year!
I don't have any more records until after I bought it (the first time). On 7/22/01 I changed the oil and the odometer read 71,502. So here's the question. If it's 171k, that means it only averaged 1600 miles since 1994. Or if it's 271k, then it was driven over 100,000 miles in 6 years? But that just doesn't seem as likely to me.
I sold the bus to Richard in 2004 but we didn't record the mileage. But when I got it back in 2007, it read 12,000 on the odometer. So sometime while it belonged to Richard, the odometer definitely rolled over.
That means right now with 28,294 on the odometer, my bus has over 228,000 miles. Or maybe 328,000 but most likely it's just 228k. Over 35 years that's an average of about 6500 a year.
