till the wheels fall off

 There's one theory of car ownership that says keep driving it even after the wheels fall off. Bolt them back on and keep going. So here's my personal experience with that approach. Maybe it would work better on a Toyota, but on a 2007 Dodge caliber it became impractical. It was running 3 to $4,000 a year in repairs, on top of normal oil changes, tires, brakes, batteries, windshield wipers, and anything else. Plus you're without the car while it's in the shop. 

Then the dash lights went out. This particular dash is not intended to take apart. So it required buying a mini desk lamp that would plug into a USB port for dash lights. Then things kept rattling and slowly coming loose. So retightening them up and using loctite helped some, but the thing basically was rattling apart. It felt perfectly smooth driving down the highway but somehow it just wouldn't stay screwed together. Also mine had some kind of separate specialized amplifier for the stereo system, so it was practically impossible to put in an aftermarket touch screen infotainment replacement. I did it anyway but the speakers never worked quite right. Just got to be very frustrating.

Keeping an American car for 20 years might work okay if you have multiple cars and you're doing your own repairs in the garage. Even doing it that way cars are much harder to work on than they used to be. They're not engineered for the weekend mechanic anymore, not that they ever really were. Of course this is going back a long ways, but if you look under the hood of a 1968 vehicle you'll see there's tons of open space to work on things. Sometime in the 70s they started filling up the entire engine compartment with junk. 

So keeping the 2007 Dodge caliber and just fixing it constantly didn't really work very well. It was becoming as expensive as making payments on a car that you could drive all the time. In theory the maintenance cost would go down eventually, but when the transmission went out that was the end. Replacing transmissions and engines runs into thousands of dollars. On modern vehicles, meaning anything built after 2000, the engine and transmission should easily last 250,000 miles. But my experience is American cars simply won't do it. The answer? You got it. Toyota