I look at this question from potentially another point of view, which is how much MORE reliable is a vehicle for which you drop 2-4x as much money?
If you test drive the car, identify issues, know what it costs to fix, replace, deal with, then you are in a good spot. If you can identify the high likely fail points and know the cost to mitigate them, then you'll know if it truly a good deal.
I did this last year with two Subaru FOresters. We purchased them, fixed them up (had to rebuild an entire engine) and shipped them to the UK and then drove to Cape Town.
Great news - they made it! Total cost for the vehicles and vehicle work was about $4,000 USD. So, you can definitely do it and can definitely save a lot of money by doing it.
One of the big things we saw is that a lot of people would "overbuy" as in getting more vehicle and more performance parts than they actually would use and of course not actually knowing how to utilize all the options (winch, etc.)
Plus, it is kind of fun taking a $1,000 beater you buy with 240,000 miles on it and driving it 15,000 miles across the globe.
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