100,000 miles

100,000 miles, 24th September 2008

Last week my Mk V's odometer clicked over to 100,000 miles. Quite a lot for a car that's barely over 4 years old. Fortunately everything appears to be ticking over just fine and there have been no unexpected expenses now for nearly 12 months. Long may this continue.

For the past year, the car has been enjoying a slower pace. The car was last serviced in November last year and is still predicting another 9,600 miles or so before requiring another service. I think my tactic of "batching-up" car usage to minimise the number of cold starts is contributing to this.

My Mk V has just one cosmetic fault which I am a little disappointed with. The VW wheel hub covers show signs of some sort of corrosion. From the forums, it does not appear that my car is the only one to experience this. It's a strange form of corrosion which I think is best described as the "milky worm" type. Until seeing it on my own car, I might originally have suspected that this sort of corrosion may well have been caused by using a strong alloy wheel cleaning solution. But I rarely use these (maybe I've used them twice in 4 years) and the same corrosion has also started to appear on the VW hatch handle and I definitely have never used any strong cleaning solution there. If this corrosion had appeared whilst the car was under warranty I would have tried to get them replaced by a dealer. Again, from the forums, I gather some people have been successful at doing this. For me though, it doesn't bother me enough to pay to get them changed. Just a little shame though.

On a similar note, a while back I think an accident repair place washed my car's wheels with a strong cleaning solution which bleached the black plastic wheel nut covers. I found it was a relatively quick and simple job to rejuvenate them. Just remove them, wash and dry them and then spray them with a few coats of matt black paint before refitting them. They come up looking as good as new!