The Altima Is $2,200 Cheaper. Half as Many Reach 200,000 Miles.

Shopping used sedans is an exercise in staring at nearly identical cars with unequal prices. A 2012 Camry and a 2012 Altima are the same size, the same shape and the same idea. One costs two grand more. The internet will tell you the Toyota is worth it. I wanted a number.

So I took every listing from 2005 to 2015 — same age band, so nobody gets an unfair advantage — and asked a single question of each model: what share of them are still on the market with more than 200,000 miles? A car that reaches 200,000 miles did its job. One that vanishes before that did not.

The Camry: 16.5%. The Altima: 7.6%. The Toyota costs $2,199 more and is more than twice as likely to still be earning its keep past 200,000 miles.

The cheap ones are cheap for a measurable reason

Line the table up by price and it reads almost as a mirror image. The four cheapest sedans here — Altima, Malibu, Sonata, Fusion — are also four of the five least likely to reach 200,000 miles. The market is not being sentimental about Toyota and Honda. It is pricing observed survival.

The Altima's number has a specific cause, and it is not a mystery to anyone who has owned one: the CVT. Nissan's continuously variable transmission of that era is the single most-reported failure on the model, it tends to go somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 miles, and replacing it costs more than the car is worth by then. A car does not reach 200,000 miles when the repair that stops it costs $4,000 on a $5,000 vehicle. It gets scrapped, which is exactly why it never shows up in the listings. I went through which model years are worst in Altima years to avoid.

The Corolla surprise

One result did not fit my expectations at all. The Corolla — the car with possibly the strongest indestructible reputation on the list — comes in at 11.1%, below the Malibu.

I do not think that means Corollas break. I think it means Corollas do not get driven far. They are second cars, teenagers' cars, short-commute cars — they age out on the calendar rather than the odometer. That is the limitation of this metric worth being honest about: it measures miles survived, not years, and a car that only ever does 6,000 miles a year will look worse than it is.

The Camry, Accord and Civic are all cars people put real highway miles on, which makes their scores harder-earned.

What this is worth in dollars

Say you buy the Altima and save $2,199. If it stops at 150,000 miles and the Camry stops at 220,000, you paid slightly less for 70,000 fewer miles of driving — around three cents per mile more, before counting the repair that ended it or the fact that you are now car shopping again three years earlier.

That is the whole argument for buying the boring one. Not brand loyalty, and not that Toyotas never break. Just that the cheaper sedan is priced correctly, and "priced correctly" means the discount is roughly what the shorter life is worth.

Two caveats before you take this as gospel. First, an individual car beats its model average every time — a maintained Altima with records will outlive a neglected Camry, and it is not close. Second, at this age the deciding factor is history rather than badge: get the VIN and run a free VIN check for title brands, odometer consistency and open recalls. Then look at the service records, because on a $5,000 car those pieces of paper are the most valuable thing in the transaction. The rest of what I check is in the inspection checklist, and the models that go furthest of all are in cars that actually reach 200,000 miles.