Engine Hours to Miles for Dummies

Engine hour meter

Our research staffers occasionally come across questions that seem perfectly reasonable, but can't be answered without a lot of qualifications and some mumbo-jumbo. If they happen to find someone who pretends to have the absolute answer, however, they toss the URL in the candidates bin and wait for the nomination committee to pick it out. Well, today's the day for Thomas King and the eHow.com post "How to Convert Hours on an Engine to Miles" (now living on ItStillRuns.com).

You say you're not familiar with engine hours? Well, unless you've driven a big rig or farm tractor, you probably haven't had much exposure to an engine hour recorder. Tractors, especially, use engine hours because – let's be real – the miles traveled doesn't mean much when the equipment's being operated in low gears or just idling to run the PTO (in reality, that's also true of passenger vehicles, but very few of them have engine hour meters). When it comes to maintenance, the hours driven is probably more important than the miles traveled, but that's especially true of taxis and delivery vehicles that sit idling a lot.

King, apparently a stranger to anything more mundane than a Benz or a Bimmer (Tom's a lawyer), told his readers that if you want to convert engine hours to miles, all you need to do is Determine how many hours have accumulated on your engine. Multiply the amount of hours on your engine by 60. Use the number you come up with to estimate how many miles are on your engine. For example, 1,235 hours on an engine equates to approximately 74,100 miles.

Well, yeah, though King apparently doesn't know what "estimate" means... The problem? Nothing that has an engine hour meter is likely to run at an average speed of 60 MPH. Heck, even long-haul truckers miss that number by at least 10 MPH. The real answer? Why do you care? if you have an hour meter, use those numbers for maintenance, not to mention that if you're driving a truck, it's likely you have an odometer anyway.

King admits that his method is "an approximation, at best," but we think that 1) he should have used a more realistic average speed and 2) he should have said "average speed" somewhere in there. He didn't, and we think that renders Thomas' "answer" perfect fodder for a Dumbass of the Day award.

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