why do some engine maintenance cycles run off hours, like generators, but others off miles, like cars? (Besides the obvious)
In: Engineering
Hours is probably the best indicator unless you want to use a much more complex system.
Cars typically use mileage instead because traditionally it was quite easy to track with just a simple mechanical setup, and for the average car there’s going to be a reasonably good correlation between miles and hours (though there are obviously exceptions). It was cheap and easy to measure and it was good enough, so that’s what the car industry stuck with, at least on the driver-facing side.
Internally modern cars will actually track a lot more. Manufacturers will sometimes deny warranty claims if they see that a car or truck has an excessive number of idle hours on it, even if the mileage is still inside the warranty limit.
The oil life monitors on cars with flexible oil change intervals will actually take a lot of factors into account, like how hard the engine has had to work or how many cold starts have accumulated since the last oil change. But even though the engine computer is keeping track of those numbers, manufacturers only expose the mileage since that’s what people are familiar with.
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