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Owning your car outright and knowing no one can take it away from you because you didn't make payments, or that no one can charge you for driving it too many miles is an understated joy of driving any car. Trading up and always chasing the best or newest will make it hard to do that, at least for me.
This car may not be a collectible but it is still a rare breed amongst modern cars. Its a small car with RWD, near 50/50 weight balance and an inline-six (in some cases with two turbos) that costs less than the 3 series but delivers all if not more of the fun. Mine is a 6MT SGM which makes it all the more rare. Sure, there are other cars that do one or two things better but none that do nearly all things well. It doesn't sound like BMW is going to continue this kind of tradition for very much longer so I will hang onto my car just in case they don't. And I'm certainly not going to rush off to sell it and take the massive depreciation that this car has wrought upon me. Just because its not going to be on some collector's list doesn't mean it isn't a collector's item to me.
Now if the 1M is reliable or this car turns out to cost more to maintain than buy a new car (doubt it) then I'll change my mind. But as someone said earlier (paraphrasing here) I don't see spending two or three payments on repairs every year or two as worse than dumping more money on a new car.
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