Total maintenance cost over time

[combhua]

My wife and I were having a discussion about our finances (as I'm sure a lot of people are these days) and I wondered roughly what the total cost of reasonable maintenance is over the first 10 years of a volvo compared to the first 3 years. We have two volvos and part of our discussion was whether to retire our 1999 V70 and buy a new one or lease one.

I imagine the first three years are just oil changes and air filters basically (and atm Volvo has a special that pays for the first three years of maintenance. But I figure by the time 10 years rolls around you're looking at between 125,000 and 150,000 miles and you've probably replaced a lot of serious parts. I haven't owned many cars, so my question is, how much would that total cost of maintenance and repairs roughly work out to be?

Based on the quick math I did, buying an S40 at retail plus tax, title, license, etc works out to be about $37,000. Leasing the same cars based on the same MSRP works out to be about $47,000. (* I used lease values based on what my local volvo dealership had on their website for lease prices, down payment, etc).

Now, the value of a car at 10 years is practically negligible as a resale in my experience, so that's why I picked that number. So with a $10,000 difference, how much of that is used up by the maintenance and repairs over the years?

The remaining amount would be compared to the peace of mind I would have leasing a new car every 3 years as opposed to hoping my luck holds out on any given car for 10.

Just a curiosity that came up and we figured we'd ask the experts

As reference, here are the figures I quickly threw together

[MadeInJapan]

For the exception of our V70 our cars have been bought used. It is costing very little to maintain both the S70 and the 240 but because we bought them used, the initial investment to get them up to par soon after we bought them was much more than the amount of several years of maintenance added together.