I bought my '97 Protege' LX brand new on July 5 1997 with 10 miles on it. Nine years and 218,000 miles later, this car may be at or near the end of its usable life. We just took it to get the inspection done so we could renew our registratioon only to recieve some less than encouraging news. We knew that the catalytic converter needed repair, but there were some other issues that were discoverd which would cost more than the car is worth. It still runs, in fact I drove it into work this morning. I picked up the car last night after the garage had closed, so I don't have the list of items they found, but I remember my wife telling me that the speed sensor, and some other sensor that reads the spark plugs were among the things that needed to be replaced. I have a co-worker whose brother is a mechanic (an actual mechanic...not just a good guy who knows a lot about cars) and I'll check with him to see if we can get the cost down. If not, then I'll have a great excuse to go shpping for that '01 Millenia! In the mean time, we just got a '95 Ford Windstar. But that kind of sucks because we were so looking forward to having two cars instead of struggling with just one.

 

Just an update: I got the paperwork back from our garage and the following items were listed.

The cat converter
Speed sensor
Misfire in cyl. #4

The car still runs fairly normally at this time, but the engine is dying. Being that the car is 9-years old and has accumulated over 200,000 miles on it, I'm starting to feel that it would not be worth the expense to fix it. It's kind of frustrating because the car still looks good and as I said before, it's running. But it looks like it will be finally time for a new or newer car.

 

The Cat converter and speed sensor should not be that terribly expensive to repair. Was there any reason given for the cylinder 4 missfire that would be expensive such as low cylinder compression or is it just due to worn plugs or a shorting plug wire? Not that I would try to talk you out of a Millenia 93greenstrat . The ride difference is not even mentionable.
My 91 323 is just over the 180k mark and still running like a champ. Ok, it is a bit on the gutless side but still gets me from A to B without any trouble so far.