I don't want to disagree too much with Grey Wolf here, but... while I'm in total agreement that there indeed are cases in life where you can buy a $100 item that'll last a lifetime and a $10 Chinese-made item that'll last a year, for cars the cheapest way to go is definitely to go used. No question there.

UNLESS - and that's what your data is doing with that $8k on a Fiesta - you're going to have such unreasonably and disproportionally high standards for your clunker that you'll always want to fix everything so it always continues to be 100% perfect as it ages.

I lived through this with my dad - who's that kind of perfectionist. I was an amateur mechanic in my free time and had fixed up a few vehicles already, when I convinced him we should buy this (old) fullsize van for sale I found to use as our company vehicle (up to that point, we just rented commercially any time we needed one). The guy was asking $500.

We bought it, and my dad took charge at this point and brought it to a mechanic we knew... and every time that mechanic pointed out "hmm, there's this thing that should be fixed" my dad was like "go ahead, we like quality and reliability and won't cut corners!" and in the end, when this van got out of there, we had spent a hair under $10,000 in new parts and labor.

I said... dad, $500 for an old van on which we might have to fix stuff eventually makes sense, or then $5,000 on a newer van on which we're less likely to have to fix stuff ALSO makes sense, but now we have a $10,000 old van and there are still lots of things on it that aren't new and may break..... had I known you wanted to turn it into a new vehicle, I'd NEVER have recommended something that old and that cheap!