Seems like a lot of people are willing to spend a lot of money for not much. I bought a Chrysler Horizon with a 9 month loan in 1979, a Voyager without a loan in 1986, another in 1992 with an 18 month loan, and a Yaris in 2008 without a loan. Chrysler used to abuse their warranty registration access to my address to send me marketing material. I told them to have more faith in their product, because I planned to drive them past Y2K and to stop wasting their money trying to peddle me new vehicles. The VW Beetle arrived in the middle of the ear of Planned Obsolescence for the Auto Industry. Ford launched a market research to get information about their surprising competition, assuming that bugs were being bought by people who could not afford a "real" car. To their surprise they found that VWs were being bought by doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, ..., who didn't fall for the Planned Obsolescence new car as status symbol PR line.