It's a rainy Sunday morning for me, so I thought I'd go through all the invoices that I've paid to keep my '98 E300 - just in case you need any help justifying your beautiful new addition to the family. I've owned my car for a little over 15 years - let's call it 182 months. Amortizing what I've spent so far over 182 months, excluding fuel, the car has cost me $274.48 per month. I gather you do most of your own maintenance, so I would expect that figure to be much less for you.

As of this morning the car has 458,169 miles. I bought it with about 46k miles, so my cost per mile for maintenance and repairs comes to about .12/mile. I estimate my fuel costs over that time is about .10/mile as diesel seems to have averaged $3/gal over that period.

Not as cheap to operate as our RAV4, but I wouldn't hesitate to take her cross-country tomorrow. In fact, I put 1,200+ miles on last week for work.

Great looking car. Congrats!