Sure, you can drive cheap beaters for almost nothing.
And how safe will you be doing that ????
Almost all the cars I've ever owned are in the under 500 bucks category....
But having a half-decent, half safe care is a pretty high priority to me. 

On the Vanagon parts content of the 50 Worst cars ...
You sure got me on that one, and I fancy myself as having a very, very broad
knowledge of cars, going back many decades.......
If I had to guess I'd say the Mosler. And that's a wild guess that doesn't
seem very logical anyway.
So I'm curious .......if no one is going to answer your challenge, I'm sure
waiting to find out what car, and what parts. 
Scott
www.turbovans.com 
-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of
Jim Akiba
Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2007 7:07 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re: Best Cars to go 200,000 Miles

Dunno, I think you save a lot more if you simply never ever buy a new car.
No reason to nurse it to 225k just to save money... if that's the only
reason, there are still better ways. Buy a crappy early 90s throttle body
injected 4 cylinder sunbird... like three times, pay $400 each get 70k out
of each, average another $500 in maintenance on each. They'll be sh*tboxes,
but they;ll go. It's a joke among my friends that "the run badly longer than
most cars run". It works, my buddy drew knows from experience.

Jim Akiba