My wife's 2003 Cavalier:

Now, don't get the wrong idea - I wouldn't really have bought a Cavalier for myself. Of course, if I *had* to have front-wheel-drive, and it *had* to be easy to take it for service at the local Chevy dealer .... well, then this car may be one of the very best choices. This is the 40k mile '03 my wife and I located for her in '04, two years before we were married. Talk about a frustrating experience ... practically no one with a clean newer Cavalier would let it go for under $10,000, and insisted the only thing to be had for under $12,000 new was an Aveo! Meanwhile, her parents thought (reasonably, in my opinion) that it should be possible to get a new Cav for $10k or a year-old one for $8k, and that just wasn't happening. Several people also tried to talk her into all sorts of other models that she just didn't want (and after working on my mom's 3.1L Corsica, I wouldn't want either!). Frustratingly, the poor girl turned up her nose at a near-pristine '89 Grand Marquis I located for $2000 - whined loudly about supposedly not being able to see or somesuch - and any Mustang we found was either too expensive for what it was, or in a distressingly poor state of tune, or riddled with rust holes, or some combination thereof. Well, after plenty of searching, we found this nice little base model with exactly the options she finds useful - automatic transmission, tilt steering (she's 5'0 and can't see over the wheel otherwise), and CD deck and air conditioning. She prefers manual transmissions in principle, but apparantly it'd been too long since she'd really driven one, plus she's from rural Alaska and wasn't used to dealing with the asinine traffic in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights where she was staying with an uncle for a while. (In fact, in late '04, State Farm claimed that something in the neighborhood of 17 Mile and Van Dyle in Sterling Heights was the single most dangerous intersection in all of Michigan!)

Anyway, this little car is still almost 100% stock. I've tried to suggest she should at least get 15" alloy rims when it's time to replace the tires, but she claims she can't tell the difference! Of course, this is coming from the same person who said, "You guys don't need a website, you need a support group. Maybe you could call it Fordaholics Anonymous." Heck, it's possible she might be right!