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I've been lucky with cars in that I've had 3 hand-me-downs and never had to buy my own car until now. In other words I have no experience at all. We're currently saving up for a nice car but we're not ready to buy it yet. But now my car (the car that was supposed to last) is dead and needs between $600 and $2000 worth of repairs in the foreseeable future. It's a Chevy with 160,000 miles that I don't expect to last more than 20,000-40,000 more miles. $600 is the fuel pump. I could maybe get by for awhile with only that. What I've been looking at are all Japanese cars, and more specifically a Honda Civic or Honda Civic coupe. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with those? I've done the usual searches but I like to talk to real people about it. If I'm going to spend 3x on it compared to the repair cost of my current car, then I'd like it to last 3 times as long as the current car. So if I were to spend $2,000 on fixing current car or $6,000 on buying the Honda, the Honda needs to last 60k-120k as many miles. What I'm finding with the Honda Civic is that the cars between $4k and $6k are 2005-2008 and have 80k-160k miles on them. Any advice for any of this? Has anyone had a Civic from that year range? I feel confident that the Civic with the same # of miles as my Chevy would last longer, but it needs to last enough longer to justify spending extra $.