Every production car is designed, engineered, and manufactured for one shared purpose: to be driven. Different cars have different intended use cases that dictate their respective development processes, but modern cars are all put through a barrage of durability testing prior to reaching dealer lots. These durability tests can range from a millions of miles of regular on-road driving to hundreds of hours being pushed to the limit on a race track and thousands of miles of off-road thrashing. This begs the question: what’s the closest you’ve ever come to torture testing your car? Sound off in the comment section below.
Whether you drive a 100-mile one-way commute to work seven days a week, so you’re really testing the on-road longevity of your daily driver, or you have a penchant for taking unpaved rocky shortcuts on your daily commute that push your crossover to its limits, we want to hear about it!
Off-roading my ’03 Honda CR-V was the closest I came to torture testing it
I have decided to view the utter shitshow that was my first-car experience as proof that the universe teaches me life lessons rather swiftly, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a nightmare. My 2005 Saab 9-3 Cabriolet that I bought off Craigslist for $5,000 when I turned 18 was the polar opposite of reliable, so much so that I ultimately was forced to junk it and buy a dull, reliable daily in the form of a 2003 Honda CR-V EX with RealTime all-wheel drive. I didn’t treat it much like a dull daily driver, though.
I ended up falling in love with my trusty brown CR-V. It was supremely adaptable, safe and reliable despite my best efforts to destroy it. One of my favorite things to do with it was go off-roading, which yes, it was technically capable of, but I took things farther than the average CR-V owner. From mud bogging to donuts in the sand dunes to bombing down unpaved trails that were almost certainly on private property in hindsight, my CR-V never quit on me and never got me stuck. I wouldn’t recommend it if serious off-roading is your schtick, but the occasional romp in the dirt never caused much trouble for me. That or using my 2017 Mini Cooper S four-door for a track day in the Mojave Desert in the summertime, but I’ll save that story for another time. What’s the closest you’ve come to torture testing your car?
