We went through millions of listings and, for every major model built between 2008 and 2015, worked out how many are still on the market today with 250,000km or more showing. The answer sorts Australia's cars into two camps, and the line between them is not the one most buyers assume.
The workhorses that won't quit
The top of the list is all utes, four-wheel-drives and work vans. Nearly three in ten old LandCruisers still for sale have cracked 250,000km. The Prado is right behind at 28 percent, the HiLux and the HiAce van both around 23. Run down through the BT-50, Triton, Ranger, D-Max and Navara, and you are still looking at one in six or better.
Share of each model's 2008-2015 examples still listed today with 250,000km+.
Driven harder, yes, but that isn't the whole story
The obvious explanation is that utes and 4WDs simply cover more ground. That is true, and the data shows it: a decade-old HiLux or LandCruiser has typically done around 12,500km a year, against roughly 8,000 for a Corolla or a Golf. So a work ute racks up about half as much again.
But that gap does not come close to explaining the result. A LandCruiser is about 50 percent more driven than a Corolla, yet it is nearly seven times as likely to still be for sale at 250,000 km. The rest are durability and demand. These things are built to keep going, and just as importantly, someone always wants one that still runs. A tired 4WD gets fixed and sold again. A tired hatchback gets scrapped.
The half-million club
Push the bar up to 500,000 km, and the market gets stranger. There are more than 500 Toyota HiAce vans, over 440 Camrys and around 400 Ford Falcons listed for sale right now with half a million kilometres or more behind them.
Vehicles listed right now have passed 500,000 km. Work vans and ex-fleet sedans lead.
The vans make sense; a HiAce is bought to be worked. The Camry and the Falcon are the interesting ones. Those are the old taxi and fleet fours, cars that spent their first life doing airport runs and were engineered for exactly that. An ex-fleet Camry that has seen 500,000km was, in a sense, only ever doing its job.
The cars that bow out early
At the bottom sit the small cars. Only about 4 percent of 2008-2015 Corollas still on sale have reached 250,000 km, and for the Golf it is barely 2 percent. It is tempting to read that as fragility, and it isn't, not really. Some small cars go a very long way; there are still Corollas listed past 500,000km. The truth is quieter. A commuter hatch is driven less to begin with, and by the time it is fifteen years old and tired, it is worth so little that fixing and reselling it makes no sense. High kilometres plus low value is where a car quietly leaves the market for good.
What this means when you're buying
The useful takeaway is that a big number on the odometer is not the enemy people treat it as. A 250,000km HiLux with a clean service record and honest wear can have more life left in it than a 120,000km European SUV that has been neglected. Judge the car in front of you: how it was serviced, how it drives, and how the wear matches the story, not just the figure on the dash.
The catch is that a big number is also exactly where the dodgy histories hide. High-kilometre cars are the ones most worth winding back, and the ones where a hidden write-off or finance owing does the most damage to an unsuspecting buyer. Before you commit to any high-kilometre car, it is worth checking whether the reading has ever jumped backwards, and a Carify report pulls the odometer history, write-off and finance record in one go. If durability is your priority, our list of the most reliable cars in Australia is a good place to start.
How we did this
The figures come from Carify's analysis of the Australian used-car market, covering models built between 2008 and 2015 as listed in mid-2026. "Still for sale at 250,000km" is the share of a model's listings from those years showing 250,000km or more. We capped readings at 600,000 km to exclude obvious odometer errors and placeholders, so the half-million club counts are genuine, and used the model's typical kilometres by age to estimate yearly usage. It measures which cars stay in the market at very high kilometres, which reflects both how far they are driven and how long they keep going.
