what do you mean?

Oh one can make it as expensive as can be, tho there will be some kind of limit of minimum costs. There are cars that gain more value by the year than their expenses are, but those are not the type people who need to use the car weekly normally would buy.

In the end it is a price paid also for convenience, and to me such is worth a decent amount of money Take me for example I could do nicely without a car of my own, I rented one every now and then, I took a lot of public transport. But now with the kid in daycare twice a day I need to go there, takes me 1,5hrs single travel with public transport, and 15 min with car (or 20 if it really is busy) So I save about 5 hours by owning a car. I bought a 10yr old from EF, I have the money for a new one, and have bought new ones in the past. But don't see the need anymore for such overall costs and I keep my cars a few yrs max anyway. Leasing would make it even more expensive, and I like the idea of the car being completely mine without any further responsibilities so I can care shit about a dent or scratch.

True this is generally the case. However, things are changing slightly.
With the popularisation of Fuel Injection in the 80s, cars from that era are actually NOT that hard to maintain.They have simple ECUs that are not full of sensors that can go wrong. And the cars we are talking about were used everyday back in the day.

They consume a little more, are a little more unsafe, but millions and millions of us survived driving around old cars and there is so much scaremongering concerning safety these days. Probably to get you to buy another car.

As soon as my friends have one child, out goes the sensible golf, replaced by a monstrously big SUV. Because "it's safer" (which I find such a selfish response) and "we need to carry the child's stuff" (how spoilt does the kid need to be that you carry more staff for the baby than for yourselves?).

Maybe I'll change when I have my own kids, but I doubt it....

Well truth be told, a big car is nice when having kids, just trow in the buggy and such. Since who cares, space enough anyway.

And yeah I recall the days where I spend whole weekends replacing a piston, but truth be told I'm done with spending weekends under the hood, and for years I lived next to a very large car repair shop (over 100 employees), so could borrow whatever tool I needed. I still do the simple things like braking discs and such, but that is about it.

There is A LOT of wiggle room in Zurich if you take it yourself, I would say much more. Just loosen up and respect the inspector as an expert. Just turn up looking scruffy with oil under your fingers as though you just put the car back together in the last hour [even if you didn't]. Many of the inspectors are closet car nutters, even the ones who aren't apparently, they are sympathetic. They will happily show you the issue under the car. In Zug they seem to allocate cars to inspectors by marque, and have special days for Ferrari's etc. They have a new system now and are very time focussed. Back in the day I had an old Audi S6, and thought I was an Audi king until I met this inspector who knew far more about them, and this particular variant than I did . He took me round my car telling me loads of cool stuff that had been changed and done in the past, and what I needed to do to pass. It was simple and the car was better for it, it was stuff a garage might have missed.

I once bought a wardrobe converted into tool storage on Ricardo for a few francs, unbeknown to me the seller was an inspector, and he pointed out a slight technical issue with my trailer. We both went through the whole trailer, I got loads of advice and tip about setting up braking, etc.

The Zurich one is especially cool, one of my favorite moments was seeing an F40 owner, I guess he just bought the car as a project and this was its first MFK before he could drive it. He was so pleased and the car was just burbling away.

If you service the car there? Sounded like the guys from that garage