Cars dont die at 100k. Cars don't die at 250k either. What happens is that cars break - at any mileage - and require fixing. When your £8000 car breaks and needs £500 spending, you spend it. But here in the UK everyone wants a 12 plate Audi diesel, in white, for just £399 a month. So used cars are worthless, used cars with high miles even more so.

So, when that same £500 bill you'd pay on your £8k appears when your car has 150k on the clock and is worth £900, you throw the car in the bin. Did it die of high mileage? of course not. It was just a victim of the chronically low used car prices.

In other countries it is different. Your 150k £900 car would be worth more over there - enough that when it drops that 500 quid (or $760) bill on you, you pay it.

The days of cars being genuinelly life expired having rotten to death are long gone. It's now all about economics. Your average garage charges 50-70 quid an hour to fix a car so even simple faults can cost more than people are prepared to spend.

Especially when you can drive somebody elses white Audi A3 S-Line for £x a month instead.

Plus, Americans seem more tehcnically minded and are more likely to spend money on preventative maintenance than us Brits. Some of the guys on the American BMW forums are changing cooling systems at 60k irrespective of breakdowns. They are more likely to invest in suspension refreshes etc - they've got more money invested in preventative maintenance which again makes them more likely to keep the car. Next time you are over there pick up a copy of Car and Driver. You'll be amazed at the level of technical detail some of the reviews etc go into, over here nobody seems to care about that stuff.

For one thing, they have a climate which allows cars to live longer. They don't put excessive amounts of salt on their roads and they don't have perpetual rain, nor the salty air that comes with living on an island.

One thing I did also pick up on, is that a lot of ordinary people there know a bit more about how to treat engines, and the importance of regular oil changes - even women seem to know this, compared to here where I've never met a woman with any interest in servicing or even mild concern about oil changes.

Might be driven by the fact that, where I was in Ohio at least, there are 'oil change' bars that do nothing except 'drive in-drive out' oil changes. You literally pull up to one like you would a petrol station, and they do an oil and filter change while you wait in 5 minutes flat.

US doesn't have dated plates, so used cars depreciate less. It isn't as easy to find something cheap with low miles just because it is 5 years old like you can do in the UK. Hence no shortcut on depreciation, you either swap for similar mileage car or you use it till it dies and buy new.