356000 miles on a 1972 Volvo 142E.
It was distinguished from all the other tarnished-gold Volvos of that era, by the bullet hole a friend shot in the driver's door. The car had shamed me in front of a batch of Texans by getting stuck in a big, el-esleasmo viscid mud pond, out elk hunting. Imagine their coarse and derisive drawled hooting as the Colorado guy had to plunge shoulder-deep in the Great Sopristic Mire to chain it up. If the car thought I would let it get away with that, it thought ... wrong. When I told my pard he could go ahead and shoot it, it flipped over on its back, wheels in the air, and arced submissive fluids all over itself, begging reprieve. Wretched self-abasement did not save it. I was proof against its pleas, hardened my heart against its sniveling, and requested the shot, which followed hard upon.
Not only the shot Volvo, but all other mechanical devices in and around my house, behaved impeccably for more than a year after the moment of discipline: let no one try to convince you that machinery is not in silent communion with each other in the reaches of the night. The hard lesson administered to one Volvo corrects many a contumacious printer and chest freezer for months yet to come.
As most distance drivers know, car systems have different lives - say, 2 - 3 years for tires (at 30000 per year), 2 or 3 for brakes if you are ham-footed, 7 for an engine, 6 for a muffler, that kind of thing. I reached a year that seemed to have a near-infinite number of factors; I would have had to replace every part of that Volvo but the connecting duct tape to rejuvenate it. And then I would have had a sullen and resentful late- life Volvo continually seeking new chances for treachery in front of the denizens of other states even more coarsely cackling than the Texans had hoped to be. I can hardly imagine the orgies of humiliation it would have inflicted on me if it could have got me where it wanted me, broken down in front of ... Californians.
I decided on death with indignity. When it entered hospice, I threw a party and invited everybody who ever went anywhere in it, with their kids, to whom I issued bright paints. They decorated it rapturously for its last cruise: Pollocky spatters, Disneyesque mermaids, Ancestral Puebloan handprints. One thing I might have done differently, or might have done the same with more emphasis, was to invite every girlfriend who had ever "shared" it with me. Some of them were right in there smiling and painting and saying, "You remember that time in the sandstorm out in Canyonlands?"; some were like electrons, negatively repelling each other in uneasy orbital shells; and at least one dumped me as being insufficiently reverent about 'the relationship.'
So it came to pass that 'volvo' became 'mortuus sum.'