One of the very few virtues of growing older is that I am no longer forced to work on my cars for being too poor to afford a real mechanic. I have never bought a new car. Just bad economics there. The newest I ever bought is my current truck (a Tacoma) which was a bare-bones model reclaimed after the original buyer could not make the payments then sold for a remarkably decent price.
I've never rebuilt a motor, but timing gears, alternators, starters, radiators, drive shafts and more were done by me for one vehicle after another. My first car was a 1970 MGB because I thought those little convertibles were so cool! Much like the little girl with the little curl when it ran well it was a sweet, sweet drive, but when it decided to act up it led me to cursing British engineering all the way back to Caesar's invasion. I hope I never have to contend with a dual carburetor again!
A 2004 Chevy Impala cured me of Detroit forevermore. Speedometer quit working? No, it's not a cable, but in the "brain" in the dashboard that also controls every other instrument in the danged vehicle. Nothing for it but to replace the thing for $500 twelve years ago. Two years later the temperature gauge went. Another brain transplant. In its model year Consumer Reports actually rated the car pretty well which is what convinced to buy a former fleet vehicle.
And German engineering? A VW Eurovan. A '98 I seem to recall. It was actually the year before they were introduced into the U.S. market having been built for Canada. All of the instruments were in metric, but hey I got pretty good at doing a running Metric to Imperial conversion in my head. I would never have bought the thing, but my wife worked for the local import dealership and they took it in used in trade then let her buy it for what they gave for it. Price was right. Five or six years later the local German car mechanic finally had to confess they could not fix it after having it for ten days trying. It was in the ignition system, but it stumped them and their electronics.
What does my family drive now? Toyotas. All Toyotas. They are not cheap to have worked on, but other than routine maintenance they've been the most trouble free cars I've ever owned. I tend to keep a car until the wheels fall off and my wife's 2013 RAV is still going strong and so long as she doesn't manage to knock the body off the frame (she tries sometimes!) I expect we'll have it another ten years.