And this is exactly why that report is somewhat misleading. On the cheaper end of cars, a lot of those are not maintained regularly, and this is the reason why they fail in the first place. And if you look closely, in most cases the reason for the fail has something to do with lights or brakes or tires. Stuff which does not cost much to fix in a Dacia, but is crazy expensive on the upper end, BMW etc.

I had the first major issue with my Dacia since I bought it 7 years ago, and it had something to do with the LPG installation, and it was about 1000€. From a TCO standpoint of view, that car is so dirt cheap, only my little Seat Mii (CNG) - which I bought used, is cheaper.

I owned almost a dozen Dacia's, but not the Logan. I never got to a car shop for any repairs until I had one with warranty, otherwise I was doing all the repairs on my own, including engine rebuilds and even a chassis swap (brand new car totalled in a crash, bough a new chassis and swapped every single part to it).

So, labor was cheap, parts were cheap, cost of ownership was cheap :)