The mileage of your car. I bet you have never even really thought about it much. Well my son does. He absolutely loves it. This is his hypernumeracy at play. You might keep an eye on your mileage so you know when you need a service.  Or you just keep an eye on it for when its getting old. I have always had old cars so always had a lot of mileage on my cars…although I actually don’t do that many miles now I work from home.

But recently the stars aligned and allowed me to get a brand new car. I have never had a brand new car before and probably never will and when I got it it had 7 miles on the clock. Most cars stay with me till the end so I expect I will have this one for a long long time.

The mileage of this car has held absolute fascination for my son. Every time he gets in the car he asks…

“What’s your mileage?”

Every time we have gone over a significant number he has noticed.

100 miles.
500 miles.
1000 miles.
2000 miles.

In fact it’s the first thing he now checks when he gets in the car. He always alerts me when we are about to pass what he believes is a significant number. Just the other day we got in it and the first thing he said was…

“6797”

Then of course shouted…

“Sixxxxxxx…….Seven”

My dad, my son’s grandad got a brand new car before me and clearly my son keeps an eye on his mileage too. And this has become some sort of competition between us. Our mileages were so close that my son couldn’t resist turning it into a race — and only he was keeping score. He’d get in my car, check the number, then report back on where Grandad was. Each time he gets in my car he says…

“We are nearly beating Grandad”

And then we did beat Grandad. And my son was absolutely over the moon. Getting ahead of Grandad that day was genuinely one of his highlights of the year.

My husband recently got a new car too, and the very first thing my son asked when he got in was where the mileage was. Modern cars have so many screens and buttons that it took us a while to find it among everything else on the dashboard. But once we did…once that number appeared…you could visibly see my son settle. Like something had clicked back into place. The number was there. All was well.

And I love how he loves numbers. How he notices them when nobody else does. This is hypernumeracy in action…a deep, instinctive connection to numbers that goes far beyond what you’d expect.

He remembers them, watches them, waits for them. Counts them up, counts them down, looks for patterns in them. Numbers don’t change their mind. They stay exactly what they are supposed to be. And I think there’s comfort in that for him. A kind of safety in knowing that 100 will always be 100, and 6797 will always turn into 6798 next.

So the mileage on my car isn’t just a number to him. It’s something predictable. Something to look forward to. Something that connects him to me, and to his grandad, and to the world around him. My mileage and Grandad’s mileage brought us all together. A simple number on a dashboard… that meant everything to him.

The problem is now I don’t think Grandad will ever get past us unless I get him to taxi us around or maybe run some errands for us in the car….now there’s an idea…