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wrote:

My daily driver is a Saturn. It's just like the 'Japanese' vehicles
except...it's made in Tennessee and they are built in Ohio or Kentucky.
It doesn't burn any oil, it starts reliably, if the experience of a
half generation of Saturn owners is a guide it will run two hundred
thousand miles with only some CV joints, brake rotors and pads and a
heater core or something. But then it's done for. It will go to the
crusher intact.

Check the latest issue of Consumer Reports, which contains
reliability statistics culled from thousands reader-supplied
information packets. Yeah, some people have luck with
specific models at times, but what counts is how that model
holds up within a large customer base, and trust me, Saturn
is a non player against the better Japanese brands.

I see a lot more twenty, thirty, forty and fifty year old American
cars than any other vehicles of that age though.

All this means is that some people are spending time and
money to maintain those older cars. At least spare and
junkyard parts are readily available for many of them. Good
for them, because they certainly will need those parts.

Get that current issue of Consumer Reports and look at how
well those American cars hold up over the long haul. Then,
see how well those Toyotas, Hondas, and other Japanese cars
hold up.

Friends who are foreign car buffs tell me that the way to make a Brit
or Euro car of any vintage run properly is to put in GM alternators, GM
transmissions (Google search "quarter-breed"), GM or Mopar ignition,
and so forth.

This is anecdotal information. Go see those survey results
in the current issue of CR.

Howard Ferstler