About 1000 miles, each way. Fly out, drive home. It was a 4-day adventure, including sightseeing.

50 miles away is considered local to me. I did bring a Fiat 850 Spider from Ohio to Georgia. But I was working a co-op job in Ohio at the time. I usually restrict my car searches to within 250 miles one way.

Hm.. I drove 230 miles one way, about 500 overall to rutland vermont from outside of syracuse NY, to buy one of my current jeeps. I got a damn steal though. 1998 grand Cherokee fully loaded limited, but with v8 delete so it had the 4.0 and selectrac 4wd. Every single thing worked perfect on it, it only had 115000 miles and no rust at all on it. 700$ and it was mine 🙂 all said and done, me and my girl rented a mazda6, drove out to NYC which is a hike in itself to see a grateful dead & company show, drove up to VT, bought the jeep, drove back across the border to register it at a NY DMV and drove back to VT to bring the jeep and rental all the way home, everything all together including jeep, DMV, rental, gas, was 1100$

Farthest to get a project car was about 380 miles round trip. The car, plus a lot of parts from 2 parts cars, including heavy, bulky sheetmetal. Completely overloaded (by weight and by volume) a 20-foot trailer, plus the truck towing it, a 1980 F-150 making a little more than 100 hp. Loaded 0-60 time was measured in minutes. Didn’t matter because the loaded trailer was so tail heavy, it would sway violently above 45 mph. I think we left home at 6 am and returned around 10 pm.

331 and 610 miles for motorcycles with a trailer and towing home. Got my Solstice with a cheap one way plane ticket and drove it home 760 miles. The things we do in the north to find a car with no rust!

About 500 miles round trip for a set of rims. I’ve also driven about the same distance to look at a ’67 GTO that I didn’t buy (gorgeous shape, but a 400 with a 2bbl and a powerglide, yuck – oh, and the guy only wanted $5k for it – this was in 1993)

I’ve gone a couple hundred miles for a few cars. The last one took me from KC to Lincoln with a transporter in tow. On the way home I spotted a billboard for a government auto auction the next day. At the time the wife needed a van to replace her 180K and rusty 2005 Grand Caravan. Kept the transporter an extra day and brought her home a shiny “new” 8 year old 2006 model with only 13K miles.

I had to drive 100.000km until I could buy my current car.

I’ll just leave this here.
http://hooniverse.info/2012/03/01/truck-thursday-1990-utilimaster-aeromate/

Live in Boston, been to South Carolina twice to buy cars. Once an MR2 Spyder, the other for a Jag XJR. Stopped in DC both times on the way back, and even made it back without incident once. No prizes for guessing which car let me down.

It depends on how you count it. The direct route for both Big Bike and Little Bike was around 70 miles for both. However, both are complicated by various factors:
For Big Bike, the hassles with the DMV paperwork meant going back by the seller’s workplace twice, which was a 50 mile one-way trip, and thus added 200 miles of travel for purchasing the bike (however: I did manage to roll one trip down into a visit to friends in the South Bay, so it wasn’t totally out of my way).
For Little Bike, the only dealership that carries them in reasonable distance is Stockton Honda Yamaha, and they’re also about 70 miles away by the efficient route, just east instead of south. However, when I bought Little Bike, I only had my learner’s permit, so I wasn’t allowed on interstates (really: divided highways with a >50mph speed limit). So, I ended up taking the scenic route back through the deep East Bay (Concord, Walnut Creek and so forth). It was fun, but I got turned around a couple times, and end up going 90 miles instead of 70. Little Bike was also a little bit of a crazy experience, as it was also the first time I’d ridden a motorcycle on the street. (Yes. I split on that trip. I told myself I wasn’t going to, but I got stuck in traffic in Walnut Creek behind someone who didn’t know what a gas pedal was, and splitting at a red light was the only way around.)

When I lived in Gwinner, ND (’04-’08), I bought my ’05 Dakota from a dealer in Moorhead, MN (85 miles away, just across the river from Fargo) and my KLR650 in Sioux Falls, SD (220-240 miles away depending on the route.) While I lived there I needed to take monthly(ish) trips to Fargo to get parts & supplies for the motorcycle.
My job in Gwinner ended due to the Great Recession, so I moved to Fargo. I once bought a pickup-box load of Austin-Healey Sprite/MG Midget parts from a fellow in West Fargo (just across 45th Street from my city of residence), but promptly sold them to my dad for his collection of 3 Sprites, a Midget & a Morris Minor at the family farm in eastern South Dakota. My dad also bought his ’68 Cutlass S convertible here after I saw it at the local classic-cars dealer.
Looking a bit further back: when I was in my teens, my dad & grandpa were looking for trucks of certain specifications to add to the farm fleet. There were a few mornings in those mid-’90’s summers where I got up much earlier than I’d have liked to accompany my grandpa to travel to such far-flung places as the Twin Cities (~250 miles one-way) or Kansas City (~500 miles one-way), but I enjoyed it because I got to do a lot of the driving (even though it was in my grandpa’s brown ’93 Cadillac Sedan de Ville.)

About 4 years ago I flew from Sydney to San Francisco (about 12000 km) to buy a 1965 Plymouth Valiant Signet convertible. I then spent about 5 days in the bay area – about 4 1/2 days doing the usual tourist stuff in SF (tour of Alcatraz, riding cable cars, etc.) and most of a morning getting registration sorted out at the DMV – then took 3 days driving down PCH, and about a week in LA, before putting it in a container to be shipped back to Australia.