Originally Posted by
slater
american cars are not built as well (in my experience), and i know plenty of people with ~11-13 year old american cars that have ditched them in favor our german or japanese. my neighbor has an early 2000s chevy truck that he's put several thousand into in the last two years. and a friend with an older honda has put the same in - a timing belt change is around $500-$800 alone. we don't need to do that. :) heck, my mother-in-law dropped about $1500 on her 10-year old odyssey about 6 months before she gave it to us - and it was only worth about $800 at that point. i had to fix it to even get it home!
and let's also take into account that a lot of people who own those cars (toyotas and hondas specifically, in my experience) defer a lot of maintenance. case in point - my wife used to complain to me a lot about car maintenance... "my parents never had to do anything to their cars when i was growing up." yes, well - they bought them new, drove them hard for 8-10 years, didn't do any maintenance aside from yearly oil changes, and then sent them to the scrapyard. were they ahead financially? perhaps. did they dodge some maintenance bullets? perhaps. personally, i sleep better knowing that when i send my family off in one of our cars, that i know what state things are in - and that the likelihood of sustaining a failure on the road is pretty low.
:)
LSD and M3 seats alone were $2400. catch can is trivial... well, i just bought a 42draftdesigns 'ultimate' can, which was $250. ouch. :)
apex ARC-8s and michelin PSS were $2500.
suspension... oh dear. probably $1000 of excess over what i could have spent doing OEM replacement stuff.
M3 wheel, BMW Performance exhaust, xenon upgrades, aFe intake.... paint respray. ;) new windshield (not cracked, but pitted). it adds up!