In some defense of the beat up clunkers, my family used to have a '92 Buick century. When my sister and I got our licenses that because essentially our car until we got our own since my parents had 3 (and later became my sister's after I got my own car and she went off to college.)

When I was about 18/19, I got t-boned at low speed by some dumbass coming out of a gas station. Traffic was moving slow, I was well in front of him when he pulled out, and he smashed in the rear passenger side door.

It's a small miracle that insurance didn't total the car since it was nearly 20 years old and couldn't have been worth too much but they didn't. My dad decided he'd rather just pocket the money instead of fixing the door (it opened and closed, locked, windows rolled up and down, etc. just had a giant dent) so we kept that car around for another probably 5 or 6 years until it finally crapped out on my sister.

At some point in a car’s life you ask yourself “is this worth getting fixed?”. The answer is often no for minor cosmetic damage and they tend to mount up.

When I got my license, I had a 1995 Geo Prizm that I affectionately called Dumpy. The paint was peeling on it, and I ended up removing the front quarter panel after a deer jumped into it (deer was walking on the side of a country road, I slowed down to 20mph, got over to the other side of the road, and it decided to jump headfirst into the side light as soon I got parallel to it). Still 100% reliable for years, and it was a manual, so no one tried to steal it, even when I managed to leave the key in the door in a city for 2 hours.

Some cars aren't worth fixing. Dumpy was $1200 in 2010. Why would I spend $500 repairing the bumper, and $2-5k repainting it?

Well, that done sound like a decent reason.