The numbers take a moment to process. Two million kilometres is roughly 50 times around the circumference of the Earth. It is five return trips to the Moon. It is, at 5,000 kilometres per week for 22 years, a working life spent almost entirely behind the wheel of the same car — the same engine, the same transmission, the same body that left the factory in 1993.
Hebley, 72, lives in Upper Hutt and has been a newspaper delivery contractor since 1968. His route takes him from Wellington up to New Plymouth and back six days a week, a return journey of roughly 700 kilometres across some of the North Island's most demanding terrain. Anyone who has driven State Highway 3 through the King Country will understand what that means for a car. The hills are not gentle and the roads are not always kind. Hebley does that run six days a week without a day off.
The Corolla goes in for a service every two weeks at Guthrie's Auto Care in Whanganui, where mechanic John Sherman has been looking after it for over two decades. Sherman was asked to verify the milestone and was careful to be honest about it.
"If I hadn't worked on it, I wouldn't believe it. I wouldn't think you could make two million without something going wrong."
He attributed the car's survival to three things in equal measure: the built-in reliability of that generation of Toyota, the regularity of the servicing, and Hebley's own attentiveness as an owner. The longest distance Sherman had otherwise seen on a car in his entire career was around 700,000 kilometres. Hebley's Corolla has nearly tripled that.
There is a detail about this car that almost none of the coverage has given enough attention. It is not actually a New Zealand market Corolla. Hebley bought a grey market import from England in 2000 when it had 80,000 kilometres on the clock. The car came to New Zealand because it had a 1.8 litre 7A-FE engine and four-wheel drive, a specification that was not officially offered in New Zealand for that model year. Hebley wanted four-wheel drive for the terrain he covers. The English import gave him that. It is, in the view of more than one expert who has looked at this story, possibly the only 1.8 litre four-wheel drive 1993 Corolla wagon in the country.
The 7A-FE engine it runs is an inline four-cylinder unit shared with the Celica, the Corona and the Sprinter. It is not a complex engine. It does not have variable valve timing, turbocharging or any of the technology that modern engines carry. What it has is tight tolerances, a robust bottom end, and decades of refinement. At 2 million kilometres on the original block, it has made a reasonable case for itself.
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Hebley watched the odometer tick over to 2,000,000 and described it simply.
"I watched it click over and I thought — two million, wow, that's pretty good. Pretty good old girl. It's got to be a she. She's hardworking, reliable, efficient."
He has driven well over 3 million kilometres total across his entire career as a newspaper contractor. The Corolla accounts for most of his working life.
The world record for the highest mileage on a private road vehicle belongs to American Irv Gordon, who put 5.15 million kilometres on a 1966 Volvo P1800S before his death in 2020. Hebley's Corolla is not closing in on that mark. But Gordon's Volvo required significant mechanical attention along the way. Hebley's car is still running on its original engine and transmission. The distinction matters.
Routine consumables have been replaced throughout — cam belts roughly once a year, tyres, filters, fluids, wheel bearings. That is unavoidable maintenance on any vehicle covering 5,000 kilometres per week. Everything structural is as it left England in the mid-nineties. Hebley says the car will run forever if you look after it properly. His mechanic, who would know better than most, does not disagree.
Sources: NZ Herald / Whanganui Chronicle, March 2022 | Autofile NZ | Autoevolution | CarBuzz
