I've also come to this bizarre conclusion. Cars are rapidly regressing. I currently drive an '09, and yearly maintenance costs have begun to approach the value of the car. I'm not sure how long I can economically keep it on the road, but what would I replace it with? A '24 Driving-IoT-Nighmare?
Depending on your locale, you're going to need to replace all suspension, steering, exhaust, frame peices etc. on that 09' car you bought used for 6. Will quickly approach 20k in time and money, and at that point, most people bite the bullet and deal with new car bullshit/payments.
Now at 15 years and 200k km still running strong, with less than 300€ service costs yearly.
I live in salt belt in US, have a 14 year old hatchback. This year alone I have had to replace 2 of the 6 control arms, rear rotors, all pads, parking brake cable (ugh), strut/shock assembly up front , clutch and brake masters, rear wheel hubs, trailing arms. That alone is like 4k in my time, nevermind the parts or if I brought them to a shop.
last year I did clutch job, vent/purge valves, intake cleaning, timing job....easily 5k
I am very jealous you have somehow avoided these things with the Clio. Idk how mazda managed to make my hatch out of seemingly rust.
Largest parts I had to replace so far were exhaust (60€ for part) last year and exhaust hatch (I don't know if that's the correct english term for that, 80€ for part) this year. Brake pads I had to change twice so far, but it was also pretty cheap.
With my mother I have a joke that rebuilding my clio from scratch would probably cost me less than tire change on her merc.
The only annoyance I have with it is that it's eating through light bulbs at annoying pace, since electricity in the older clios tends to be a bit funky. But okay, that's a 5min change usually.