A lot of miles, period.  In February, Welch did the unthinkable by turning over his odometer and hitting seven figures.  That’s a million miles.  On average, Americans drive 14,263 miles per year, according to the Federal Highway Administration.  Given those numbers, it would take just more than 70 years to do a million miles.  Automobiles — no matter the make, model or automaker — aren’t made to go a million miles or last 70 years.  Welch, a distributor for Conklin, the synthetic motor oil and additive he runs in his Suburban, says he averaged about 40,000 miles a year and traveled to every corner of the continental United States. His original intent was to drive the Suburban for a year, put about 35,000 miles on it and trade it in for another, but he didn’t like the 1995 model. “I figured I’d wait until they brought back the 1994s, but they never did,” he said. So he kept driving his blue Suburban. And the miles began to add up.  He changed the oil regularly, and Bloom monitored any work that might be needed.  That’s not to say there weren’t a few scares, none worse than in 2004, when he took a Fourth of July trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the midst of a summer heat wave.  On the way back home between Joplin and Harrisonville, Missouri— about 110 miles — he noticed his steering wasn’t as responsive as usual. It turns out, he’d been driving in 106-degree weather without the belt that controlled the air conditioning compressor, water pump, alternator and power steering.

He replaced the belt and babied it back to Lincoln, where he immediately called Bloom to tell him what happened. “He said I shouldn’t have a functioning engine anymore, that the thing should be melted down,” Welch said. That would turn out to be the most extensive work Bloom would do on the Suburban.  He took off the cylinder heads and performed a valve job. “That was a major repair on this engine,” Bloom said. “Everything else is original on the engine: the block, the crank, the rods, the engine. It’s never been out of the frame.” That was at the 400,000-mile mark. Perhaps the most amazing part of this million-mile journey is that he wasn’t yet at the halfway point at that time.  “The engine should have been ruined,” Welch said. “It should have been melted down. ” His trust in the Suburban, even after the major scare in Missouri, never waivered.  It had always gotten him where he needed to be in the past and there was a part of him that wanted to see just how far it could take him.  He never intended to get to a million miles.  He just continued to drive and practice proper maintenance with the Suburban, and the miles kept rolling onto the odometer.  When the corporate office at Conklin heard he was closing in on a million miles, Welch was summoned to Arizona for the company’s national convention.  They wanted to see — and document — the odometer officially turning over. They hooked him up to a GoPro and had a cameraman in the vehicle.