Yep, by the time you have any serious powertrain issue you would have spent enough in unnecessary and /or overpriced services to buy a brand new powertrain. When you get down to the fine print in most of these contracts there is always an escape route for the dealer. For example, the car is 19 years old with 190K miles and the engine fails and you meet all the conditions for warranty coverage. What is the dealer going to do? Replace your engine? Doubtful. Instead, they probably stipulate cost of repair or average book value of car whichever is less. So they just write you a check for $1000 and leave you with your nonoperational car. You'd probably end up buying a new car on the spot just to get home, lol.
Not necessarily. If your 19 year-old Stinger was lovingly maintained by you, and the engine craps out at 190K miles, and the dealer (holder of the lifetime powertrain warranty) writes you a cheque, and everything else about your car is a keeper, you'll use the thousand bucks toward a new engine. Why would you not? I put c. $1,300 into milling the head on my '94 van c. three years ago; it ran like a top, better than when I had bought it. Never regretted that expense to "resurrect" my vehicle: always paid for upkeep as if I intended to keep it, and the rest of the van was in really good shape, etc.
Quite possibly. But my Stinger is a daily driver so I'll probably only keep it for a short period of time (10-15 years, lol). I was just trying to point out that these extended-extended or lifetime warranties are quite likely to have minimal value and produce diminishing returns as a vehicle ages. Not bad to have some additional protection, but it's not really worth it if you had to pay a higher price for the vehicle or if the dealer in any way forces you to pay for them to routinely maintain and repair the vehicle. All they should require is that you bring the vehicle in every 5 years or so where they can inspect it at their expense.
