Originally Posted by cruentus
Sorry but this is a tired, old conspiracy theory: planned obsolescence.
The car companies build cars to satisfy new car buyers. New car buyers typically keep their cars about 3-4 years or 45K-60K miles. New car buyers sell, or trade, their cars after 3-4 years not because the cars are worn out but because they want something new -- keeping up with the Joneses.
Car companies have no incentive to manufacture cars, for the US market, that run reliably past 75K miles because the original owners of said cars will have traded up by that point. The car companies don't care about secondary or tertiary used markets because they don't make any money from those markets.
If the public demanded cars that lasted 20 years, car companies would build them. There is no market demand for cars that last 20 years. That is a fact.
The car companies actually do take resale value into consideration as that has a lot to do with how much someone is willing to pay for a new vehicle. Some companies try to maintain resale value (jeep, BMW, etc) while others don't pay it that much attention and even seem to intentionally devalue their used vehicles every couple of years. To tell the difference, just look at which companies are significantly changing the body style of a given model every couple of years. I think the ford mustang is one of the worst. It is a pretty great car and is somewhat expensive to buy new, but you can get the old ones for next to nothing because very few people want to be seen in a 1 or 2 generations old mustang. I kind of see this as screwing their customers and would avoid buying such a car.