Mark Blackwell of Jacksonville, Fla., has logged more than 1 million miles in just two Corvettes. But the first one, at just 342,000 miles, was a garage queen compared to his second car. The red 2000 Corvette coupe has racked up 773,338 miles, enough to earn it a place of honor in the National Corvette Museum.
To save you the math, that’s an average of about 43,000 miles per year, or about 117 miles per day, every day, for 18 years. Blackwell logs a lot of highway trips to Georgia and southern Florida for work.
And the Corvette is on its original 5.7-liter V8 engine, though Blackwell recently had to get the headgasket replaced at around 750,000 miles.
Blackwell turned his keys over to the museum in Bowling Green, Ky., earlier this month, calling it a “fabulous car, no complaints here.” The video above from the museum shows how surprisingly good the Corvette looks, considering all the places it’s been.
“If any car deserves to be in a museum, it’s this one,” Blackwell says, “for the miles it’s gone and the things it’s done for me.”
He credits its handling with saving his life one dark night when a bumper fell off a semi, forcing him to swerve into an interstate median, blowing out two tires in the process. “Had to obviously get the tires replaced and the car towed in that night. But any other car, there was no way in the world that I would not have hit that bumper.”
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