@Nourishinghandcream
It’s also difficult to jump off the finance track even if you want to because you possibly can’t save enough to buy the next car whilst paying finance on the current so you either take another loan or use a windfall to buy a car outright.
Nail on the head. Better to do it the other way. My first car was a cheap banger, but I saved £200 per month for the "next one", i.e. the equivalent to the kind of loan I'd have had if I'd have bought newer. The old banger lasted a few years, so I had several thousand in the bank to buy it's replacement, and then I continued saving £200 per month, so a few years later, with it's PX value, I could afford to outright buy a brand new car (smallish, mid range model). I continued to save the £200 per month which has funded replacement brand new (or ex demo) cars ever since. My OH did virtually the same, and between us, we now have 3 cars, one is 17 years old, bought brand new which is our "utility" car for local trips, supermarkets etc. One is a brand new one bought last year and the other is an ex demo one bought 2 years ago at six months old, and our savings were still not exhausted with the PX value we got. We're still saving £200 each per month and continuing to build up savings for the next replacement(s).
Only one of our cars have cost us much other than scheduled services/consumables - we've never needed a new clutch/gearbox, etc on any car. The most costly was one we kept to 195k miles and started costing us at around the 150k miles mark - in hindsight we should have got rid at that point, but it was a good/clean solid car and every time we had something done, we thought "that was it" but then something else would go wrong. But even then, it still wasn't costing more than £200 per month - it was just a few hundred every few months, and we've never had a bill for anything more than a thousand pounds!
We've tended to keep each one between 10-15 years, but as I say, our longest is our current run-around at 17 years. One or two have been PX'd earlier for other reasons, such as when we had our son and needed both cars (at that time) to be big enough for the big pram in the boot whereas we only had one big and one small hatchback at that moment in time.
I did the number crunching for the 17 year old one a while ago, taking into account the purchase price, all servicing/repair bills, MOT costs, etc. (I keep all the bills on a spreadsheet), and it worked out less than £100 per month over the 17 years! You'd never get a new leased car for that!!