For it to be a car, it probably can't be american-made :) At least not from Detroit.

Cars generally aren't made to be maintenance-free. Delorean (pardon my spelling) had maintenance-free sheetmetal and it didn't fly very far in real life. Although a neat concept - I'd love to have my 940's body made out of stainless steel. I would have left it unpainted!

I guess for any given car to be maintenance-free (well, take it to mean 20 year life at 99.99% reliability), you'd need it to weigh twice as much, cost about 10 times more, and you'd still need to change the darned oil and fill up the washer fluid every once in a while... And those are conservative estimates.

The whole idea with maintenance is that it will prevent breakdowns on the road. You do it because it's cheaper and less cumbersome than having it towed and fixed, that is.

I would generally think that any post-92 B230FD-driven Volvo will have pretty minimal maintenance requirements, compared to most recent cars -- whether domestic or imports. It was a mature design, and unfortunately most new cars are very young designs in initial stabilization phases. Amortized over the life of the car, you should be able to get by with about $85 per month, methinks. And that in order to really keep it up tip-top, i.e. change exhaust components and suspension components preventively instead of when they fail or start giving problems. For a car that was 'saved on' by the previous owner (i.e. under-maintained), that translates to having to shell out up to about twice as much per month by you, and saving about the same by the P.O.

Cheers, Kuba