Ever since Facebook changed things up and started mixing our newsfeeds with all sorts of random stuff from topics we’re interested in (or, I don’t know, just talk about in real life and not on social media), I’ve been seeing a wide array of car content come my way during my daily doom-scroll sessions.
Recently, I came across a rather interesting group: Mileage Impossible. The post that greeted me from that community was of a high-mileage Honda Jazz—or what they call the ‘Fit’ in other markets—with more than half a million miles on its odometer. In metric-system-speak, that’s more than 800,000 kilometers. Bruh.
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Knowing how popular the nameplate is in the Philippines, I just had to reach out to learn more. This mighty hatchback is owned by Pong Proakatok, a courier based in the US. I asked for a photo of the odometer, and as of this writing, the Jazz has clocked 546,688 miles. To be exact, that’s 879,809 kilometers. The coolest part? The engine, transmission, and clutch are all original. His Facebook post read: “My motto is ‘Thousands of miles driven, millions more to go!’”
Chatting a bit with Proakatok, he shared that he used to own a ’92 Civic EG hatch which he drove daily for a year. The manual gearbox wasn’t the issue for him, but the lack of A/C and an entertainment system. Fast f0rward 2017, he bought his Jazz brand-new and in this specific colorway because—believe it or not—Snapchat used to always show it in its commercials.
A few months before he shared his car’s story, Proakatok supposedly had the Jazz’s alternator changed. But so far, he’s only done spark-plug changes every 100,000 miles and oil/filter changes every two to three weeks, as well as tire changes every 10 to 12 months. Considering how much this car is driven, it’s no surprise how demanding its maintenance is. To give you a better idea of just how much Proakatok drives this daily, it’s
As high as the hatchback’s mileage is right now, though, the original belts are, according to the proud owner, “surprisingly still holding up.” That’s actually pretty awesome. “People find it hard to believe that a clutch, yet even a car could last that long but with normal maintenance and normal driving, I'm sure the car will last a million miles,” added Proakatok.
It takes some darn good engineering for a car to be as sturdy as this, but at the same time, it also takes a lot of patience and care from the owner to keep it running properly like this one does. Kudos to Proakatok for being very religious with maintenance—this is how you take care of a car.
