You have misunderstood something. Yes, that car was worth the price. It is the benchmark against which I am measuring newer cars. "Cars today", which is what we are talking about, give an experience that is unlike that one. (Including the Chevy Bolt @ $14k that you mention in your other comment, which is more like a Walmart car than a Costco car, and nowhere close to the price point I mentioned or the cost/value ratio of the reference car.) That that car lasted 200k, and would have been on its way to last another 100k at least, underscores my point, not undermines it.
For the reason above, the question is not "What kind of car did you expect?" It's "What kind of car do you expect to get?" And the answer is, "Considering the opportunity we have had to make technological progress, I would expect that I should be able to find a car today that is at least as good as that one. I should definitely not expect to be disappointed to find that as a general rule what's available is so much worse."
I agree with this in principle, and would have agreed even prior to the accident, but in reality, after the period where I was forced into a "no car" lifestyle, yes, you actually do need a car in the meantime, at least while waiting for society to transform itself.
My car (at 200,000+ miles at the time of the accident) was exactly such a case of "take care of it, and all will be well", which is why I was able to avoid dealing with the nightmare that is the auto industry today. (It's also why I still think of that one as "my car," while the others I own today do not.) Again, being well-aware of the worth of a car that is well taken care of by experiencing it firsthand and having spent some time looking for something that would allow me to replicate the previous 10+ years of car ownership, you're not really teaching me anything. Because at the end of the day, it comes down to the affordances offered to you by the market, and the market deals in junk.
After my accident, for a while I blew so much money on Lyft to travel to the office and back, which was a fairly straightforward 10-mile trip one-way.
Later, after the pandemic started, I watched the movie 1922 (although I don't really recommend). Having been through the previous ordeal, the simplicity of the family's unassuming farm truck was not unnoticed. For all the money I spent on Lyft, I would have much more happily dropped it on a car similar to the one from the movie, even if it meant open-air cooling (no AC) and a top speed of 35mph.
Even before having been involved in a car accident two years ago, I have always been annoyed with the car industry, and looked on incredulously at the kind of racket that people are suckered into dealing with. Buying a car is like being forced to consume a lifestyle brand, being the result of what amounts to light collusion from automakers to offer nothing else. Since the accident, forced to have dealt with a process that I had been able to avoid up to that point by sticking with my past purchase and staving off the temptation for anything newer and shinier (which wasn't really very tempting at all, given the status quo in the car industry), I have become only more convinced of the need for a reliable $5000 "Costco car". It's a special source of despair knowing that low-income people get ensnared under the current regime that ends with them thinking that the the best option is to pour so much money into $10–20–30k cars that end up being junk, or else risk gambling on something in a lower price range.
Musk professes to have a mission of weaning it off its addiction to fossil fuels, but at Tesla's luxury car prices for what are luxury products, it's not going to make much of a dent, at least not very quickly. The availability of a no-frills EV with reasonable (i.e. next to zero recurring) maintenance costs would almost certainly contribute more to humanity than all the work so far that's gone into SpaceX and Tesla combined.
For the reason above, the question is not "What kind of car did you expect?" It's "What kind of car do you expect to get?" And the answer is, "Considering the opportunity we have had to make technological progress, I would expect that I should be able to find a car today that is at least as good as that one. I should definitely not expect to be disappointed to find that as a general rule what's available is so much worse."