Every production car is designed, engineered and built for one shared purpose: to drive. Different cars have different intended use cases that dictate their respective development processes, but modern cars undergo durability testing before reaching dealer lots. These durability tests can range from millions of miles of regular on-road driving to hundreds of hours of driving at the limit on a race track and thousands of miles of off-road driving. This begs the question: What’s the closest you’ve come to testing your car? Have your say in the comments section below.
Whether you commute 100 miles one-way to work seven days a week, you’re really testing the on-road longevity of your daily driver, or you have a penchant for taking rough rocky shortcuts on your daily commute that push your crossover to its limits, we want to hear about it!
Taking my ’03 Honda CR-V off-road was the closest I got to testing it
I’ve decided to look at the utter crap show that was my first car experience as proof that the universe teaches me life lessons pretty fast, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a nightmare. My 2005 Saab 9-3 Cabriolet, which I bought off Craigslist for $5,000 when I was 18, was the exact opposite of reliable, so much so that I was eventually forced to junk it and buy a drab, reliable daily in the form of a 2003 Honda CR-V EX with realtime all-wheel drive. However, I didn’t treat it like a lazy daily driver.
I fell in love with my trusty brown CR-V. It was extremely adaptable, safe and reliable despite my best efforts to destroy it. One of my favorite things with it was off-roading, yes, it was technically capable, but I took things further than the average CR-V owner. From digging up dirt to making donuts in the sand dunes to bombing down unpaved trails that were definitely on private property, my CR-V never left me and never stranded me. I wouldn’t recommend it if serious off-roading is your thing, but the occasional bump in the dirt never caused me much trouble. That or using my 2017 Mini Cooper S four-door for a track day in the Mojave Desert during the summer, but I’ll save that story for another time. What’s the closest you’ve come to testing your car?
