Two driveways poured the same week can be twenty years apart in condition. Almost all of that difference happens before any concrete is placed.
A properly built concrete driveway in this climate should give you 25 to 30 years with minimal maintenance. A poorly built one starts showing structural cracks within two or three. The concrete itself is rarely the variable — most residential mixes from the same plant are broadly comparable. What separates the two outcomes is everything that happens before the truck arrives.
Base preparation is most of the job. Concrete is strong in compression and weak in tension. It handles enormous downward load and almost no bending. That means a slab sitting on uniformly compacted base is doing what it is good at, while a slab bridging a soft spot is being asked to bend — and it will crack there, every time. Proper preparation means excavating to depth, placing aggregate base, and compacting it in lifts rather than dumping it and driving over it once.
Thickness has to match the load. Four inches is the residential standard for passenger vehicles. If an RV, a work truck, a trailer, or a delivery vehicle will use the driveway, that needs to be six inches or more, with the thickened section extending under the actual load path. Retrofitting thickness is impossible; it either gets planned in or it does not exist.
Reinforcement has to stay in position. Rebar or mesh does not stop concrete from cracking — it holds the crack tight so it stays a hairline rather than opening into a displaced joint. That only works if the steel is in the middle third of the slab depth. Mesh laid on the ground and hooked upward during the pour ends up somewhere unpredictable and contributes very little.
Control joints decide where cracks go. All concrete cracks. The purpose of control joints is to create a weakened plane so the crack happens along a straight line you planned instead of a jagged one across the middle. Joints need to be cut on time — usually within the first day — and spaced at roughly 24 to 30 times the slab thickness, with panels kept reasonably square. Long, narrow panels crack across the middle no matter how well everything else was done.
Drainage is the slow killer. Water that sits against or under a slab softens the base beneath it, and a softened base leads directly back to the bending problem. Positive slope away from the garage and house is not a finishing detail; it is a structural requirement.
What maintenance actually helps. Seal the surface every few years if you want to keep the color and slow surface wear. Keep joints clear of debris so they can do their job. Address settling or soil erosion at the slab edges before it undermines the base. Beyond that, a well-built driveway does not need much — which is exactly the point of building it well.
If your current driveway is cracking in a grid pattern, settling at one corner, or lifting at a joint, those are base and drainage symptoms, not surface ones. Resurfacing a slab with a failing base repeats the same failure on a fresh finish. We would rather tell you that up front than sell you the resurfacing.