We may love these cars, and some of us may come away with fairly trouble free examples, but lets face the facts. We're driving cars built by GM during a 3 decade period where they were trying to build cars as cheap as possible. When the trim on your door panels is STAPLED on (the black strip at the top of them), you know you have a pretty cheap car. Yes, the motors can go forever if you maintain them and take care of the LIM gasket before catastrophe, and yes, even the trans can go for some time if you don't beat on it, but everything else around them will break or fail at some point, especially given how old these cars are now. Couple that with the cost and effort of regular maintenance, and it can sometimes be overwhelming. There's a reason these cars can be had so cheap. In the end, it all balances out. You buy a cheap car for a good price, and your upfront cost may be low, but frequent repairs will make up for it. You buy a nicer from the same year, you may not have things break as frequently, but you will pay more up front for the car, not to mention usually more (in some cases, a LOT more) for the repairs you DO end up needing. There's no winning with used cars.
Having said that, thinking back about mine, I've been fairly fortunate in the sense that nothing major has broken. I bought the car with just under 112k miles on the clock on 08/08/07 for $7500 out the door (includes tax, title, doc fees, etc). It was in phenomenal shape mechanically and cosmetically at the time, especially considering the mileage. Only flaws I found were the right rear window and A/C weren't working when I test drove it, so the dealer agreed to fix at least the A/C as a stipulation to buying it (turned out to be the drier). For some reason, the window started working by itself the next day, and hasn't stopped since! It is now about to hit 176k miles. During that almost 6 years and 65k miles, it's needed a crank position sensor, water pump, MAF sensor (replaced with junkyard one....which I'm about to replace again), both front wheel bearings, both CV axles, outer tie rods, ball joints (replaced with very low mileage LCAs from Ed Morad), front pads (x2), rear pads (x1) and a power steering line. Granted the thing has been through 2 accidents (neither of which were my fault), so the body is pretty rough now (used the money to pay off the car instead of repairing it), and there are a bunch of things I've been neglecting doing (heater hoses, belts should probably be replaced, slow brake fluid leak, EBCM needs to be replaced/rebuilt etc, not to mention it needs a COMPLETE suspension overhaul), but I'll be damned if that sucker doesn't just keep going on the original motor, trans and s/c. Of course....now that I've jinxed myself....
I had planned on dumping a good $3k - $4k into this car since the 2 accidents pretty much paid for it, so my cost of ownership of this car for the last 5.5 years has been extremely low. Can't really buy jack for that kind of money, where as I'd have a car that looks and drives as good, if not slightly better than new if I completed the giant to do list. However, late last fall, the driver's side rocker panel molding fell off while pulling into a parking lot on my way to work because the rocker panel had completely rusted through.
That was game over for me. I'm just going to limp it along spending as little as possible on it till I'm in a position to buy a newer/much lower mileage car (1yr of unemployment kinda' drained the bank account a bit).
