> it's almost always something simple and relatively cheap That's a key point. Reliability might be good these days, but long-term repairability is very low.

> it's almost always something simple and relatively cheap That's a key point. Reliability might be good these days, but long-term repairability is very low. It's come to the point that even a mind-dumbingly trivial change like changing a brake light bulb or a battery can't be done (on a BMW, surely many other brands) without access to factory repair computers. So when the factory stops supporting your particular model, what then? I firmly believe that a century from now we'll still have historical cars from the 1950s-60s running around, but surviving cars from the 2020s will be extremely rare, since they can't be repaired beyond factory support.