My car is at 350 000 km now, and I'm not planning on selling it anytime soon. It doesn't have any special problem, except for a malfunctioning electric window lifter on one side. It's only one data point of course.
There is some percentage of cars crashed in the first week. It only takes a few of these to cancel out the average of extreme outliers like your car.
For reference I have never seen an odometer with more than 200 000 on it before. Even most classic rebuilds I have seen like 69 Corvettes have some high 100K count on them, some event have reset odometers.
Perhaps they don't build them like they used to, but our 1980's Honda sedan also easily clicked over 350,000kms too.
If I had not bought my car (it was at 300 000 km) I'm pretty sure it would have been sold in Eastern Europe instead, or maybe Africa since it's a Peugeot (a 406).
In the countryside, it's also very common to have both a nice recent car, and an old reliable one like mine for the dirty work. Most people I know do have one car that is a few 100 000s of km. Also, we mostly use diesel here, and these are supposed to be much more reliable than the gasoline engines used in the US (and I'm not going into the purported lack of reliability of American cars to begin with). I'm talking about everyday cars that are 15 or 20 years old, not classic cars.
Replacement parts on these are also far more expensive. New turbo is a four-figure number just for the part. Injection pumps are bloody expensive, too.
Less optimized designs may also be a factor. CAD and FEM modelling has only become better with time, so back in the day engineers would rather make a more conservative design, nowadays that's not so necessary any more.
Turns out it has gone round the clock...
There's probably a Youtube video that'll walk you through how to replace it. I replaced the one on the driver's side door of our 2001 Honda Odyssey last year. I think it was like $120-150 (USD) for the part and 3ish hours. I know almost nothing about fixing cars (just generally how to use basic tools), but have used info from forums and (especially) youtube to fix several things like that on our cars.
[EDIT] great thing about the Youtube videos is you can get a good idea of whether it's something you can manage yourself before you tear your car apart.
Ironically, more modern cars will probably not last as long! I can rebuild just about anything on this car, electronics included (most complicated part is perhaps a common opamp). On modern cars, as soon as the advanced ICs (say an ECU) are NLA you’re SOL.
It's only the few that were both made better, with no production flaws, and great maintenance that have lasted long enough for us to see then with 150k miles before being purchased today.
I have a 2004 Corvette with about 140,000 miles. Stuff breaks, but it is a vette. My last F150 had about 160,000 miles when I, uh, wrecked it. Still looked and drove like new.
'99 Toyota 4Runner, 232K miles (currently own); '85 Honda Civic, 197K miles; '59 VW bus, ~490K miles (with a rebuild of the 40hp engine at ~240K miles and a transaxle from a junker at ~300K miles).
You are ridiculously hard on your capital equipment. It must be nice not to have a care in the world for your expensive possessions. Personally I couldn't bring myself to torture fine machinery like that.
I don't know why my friends parents had lower mileage cars, but I know what it was with my mom:
At this point most cars were automatic, and they crammed lots of parts of the transmission into a hard-to-service single-part-number item. Three times while I was growing up (~32 000 km per year driving) she had the transmission fail at around 170 000km and the mechanic quoted her a number approximately equal to the street-value of the car to fix.
It appears to be the consumer reports data.
[1]: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_news...
[1]: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/ive-been-using-a-950000-...
Being german, i immediately associated ICE with the train of Deutsche Bahn[1] which probably do around that mileage...
People buy a lot of Chryslers, Fiats, Fords, and Chevys. You'd be lucky (or cursed, depending on how much you hate the car) to make it to 266kkm with a Chrysler Sebring, for instance.
Not everyone builds Corollas.
Unfortunately, this means the used car market is also full of moderate mileage vehicles that require a ton of preventative maintenance as soon as you buy them, giving the used cars a bad name.
If you buy a used Chrysler with 100k miles, its probably 40k miles overdue for a timing belt replacement, transmission filter change, radiator flush, alignment, brakes, tires, etc... On the plus side, you probably got it pretty cheap.
For one point of reference, Ford was notorious for "value engineering" the old US Rangers so they would die around 150k miles, but I kept mine running for 250k miles and 23 years with mostly just regular maintenance and the occasional repair. The thing that finally killed it was an aftermarket slave cylinder for the clutch that failed and blasted brake fluid all over the inside of the transmission.
And then there's the software... I don't have a lot of confidence in any company to supply software updates for multiple decades. I hope we don't end up in a scenario where wealthy people have secure vehicles and the less well-off just shrug and accept malware on their car as the price of living in modern times.
Also: Here we have a very strict road legality checkup (joints, breaks, rust, lights, belts, ..) for all cars. Once a bad/cheap car reaches the age when it starts failing the checkup, it's often not worth fixing. So while it could probably do another 100kkm with the dodgy wheel bearing, it's not allowed to without immediate expensive repair. So these checkups effectively purge every car that would need repairs to any vital parts costing more than its worth every year.
I have a 10 year old peugeot worth around $1-2k that has gone 18kkm. If it were to fail a checkup for even something simple like a wheel bearing or uneven handbrake appliance - I'd probably hesitate to repair it because I could just as well get another one (A recently checked one for $1k would limp along at least 1-2 years to the next checkup while mine is banned from the road immediately).
Car accidents are random in nature and significantly reduce average car's lifespan. Further, many cars age without being driven very far per year and 15+ year old cars are often junked even if they are relatively low mileage if they are part of even a fender bender.
You also have issues with rust independently from mileage.
I'm not sure it is...
I mean, in my country (Netherlands) the average car user drives 13k km per year, in very car heavy countries that's probably around 20k. But here it'd mean a car would last on average 20 years, that's not absurdly low by any standard.
Maybe someone could write a quick script to scrape AutoTrader.com or a similar site and see what the mileage is on cars over 20 years old that are offered. ;-)
It doesn't mean that car can't last longer than that, but more and more repairs are to be expected, and it is more likely to fail at any time. If you are a professional, keeping such a car doesn't make economical sense.
Furthermore, in high income countries, they actually want you to destroy these old cars to promote the new car market.
Also perceived safety/ convenience, a car might be good for another 100k km but appear unreliable enough that it might break down at any time.
Meanwhile, the 2006 Prius I bought two years ago just hit 110K miles (purchased with 80K miles), cost $10K, and has needed nothing more than new tires and a replacement cooling block on the engine (which was deferred by the previous owner). I plan on running this thing until they no longer can service it, a full swap of the hybrid transaxle is relatively cheap as is replacing the engine, but with regular maintenance they’ll probably last 500K or more and I’ll only have to replace the battery at some point.
Always do research on the reliability and cost of repairs on a car before you buy it, this alone was why I picked the Prius over other cars on the lot (there’s very little that can need serious repairs because of how simple the ICE design is, and the electric drivetrain components are pretty long lived as well).
[1] I've never got the hang of IPA, sorry