>I keep cars for years (currently a Volvo V70. had it for about 10 years) What gets annoying is how all the plastic bits inside start getting brittle and the seats start splitting.

Not on the saxo... it wasn't made to look expensive, so no fancy soft-like plastic and faux/fake leather. The plastic is sturdy and looks almost new, and the seats are like new, them being of knapsack-like cloth. With yellow piping on the stitches they even look fresh. It's the holes in the carpet that just won't go away by themselves.

The ugly part is on the outside - this is the generation when they replaced the shiny bumpers with plastic ones (not the first one when they put black plastic over bumper holders, that looked ugly after only two years, and then surpassed its ugliness every couple of years again, as plastic deteriorated) but still haven't mastered the art of painting them same as the car. So it's ugly graphite shit color, neither gray nor black. Whatever you do, it looks dirty, so I have to keep the car dirty as well, to make it less obvious :).