> Never buy another car. Fix what you have when you need to.
In my country most cars are bought used, imported from another country (usually Germany, sometimes the US) after they've deemed them not worth fixing (i.e. salvage). Whatever is broken is fixed up, tested for safety and emissions (we are an EU country), and sold to someone here. Labour costs are quite low (compared to Western EU & US), there's a great availability and parts, and people are quite skilled here, so pretty much anything can be done.
It used to be common to import cars from the UK (for some reason, much cheaper 2nd hand than the rest of Europe), and convert them from right to left hand drive - but a few years ago the government said they wouldn't allow those cars to be re-registered, which put an end to that.
Recently a friend had to fix the Webasto unit (diesel pre-heater) on his car and found someone who admitted his 'hobby' was fixing them. €100 later and what he thought he needed to replace was as good as new.
When the cars come here they often already have multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometers on the clock, but they are usually 'fixed' so who knows how much they've really done. Said friend's odometer says it has done 350k, but we assume it's closer to 500k.
Once cars are deemed salvage here (usually at the point where the floor is rusting out, or the frame has been damaged in an accident), parts are stripped and resold on the 2nd+ hand market, or the cars are shipped to Central Asian countries where the same all happens again.
Anyway, I'm not really sure what my point is, but it seems relevant to this. If you really want to you can keep an old car running, whether it's economical is a different story (I imagine in the US with higher labour costs and lower availability of spare parts, maybe not). But you also need to consider how things are used after your life, cars for sure do not just get melted down when you declare them worthless (one man's trash, is another man's treasure definitely applies here). I'd imagine consumer electronics and appliances are much worse for the environment in this regard than cars.