Seriously, here’s the truth:
If you service your vehicle regularly, and you pick up some basic tools to work on your own car, it isn’t that difficult to keep it maintained, which prevents a very large proportion of the really expensive failures on cars.
You no longer need to do tune-ups - you only need to change the plugs, what, every 100K miles? You need to change your lubes - engine oil, transmission fluid, differential fluid, then you need to grease any tie rods, check the coolant, battery, power steering and (if you have a manual) clutch fluid, jack up each front wheel and wiggle the wheels to check ball joints, inspect/grease your u-joints and so on that need it.
Check your tire pressure, brake wear, shock absorbers, coolant level, oil level, transmission fluid level on a regular basis.
And there you go. If you don’t abuse it, what I’ve just spelled out makes a large difference in the lifespan of most any car. Working on most cars isn’t tough until you get into transmission repair or something that throws an engine computer “malfunction indication light” (MIL) which is car engineerese for the “check engine” light. The computer checks a bit more than just the engine, but you can now rent a box to read the codes at many auto parts stores, so you can pull the code to tell you what needs to be fixed, and then clear the code when you’ve fixed it.
Most all parts are available from sources other than the big three, especially if you have a car that is more than three years old. The first year I owned a new Powerstroke, you could not get some parts at NAPA. By the fourth year I owned the vehicle, there was very little that I needed that had to come through Ford Motor Co.