You're exactly right. The complaints about these cars arise from owners that aren't able to work on their own cars. My '97 850 and mom's 2000 S70 have been great cars with few issues. Both are nearing 200K miles. I do the work on them myself and never really have to spend that much $$. We've all seen similar posts like these on the board before asking about reliability, but what should really be the deciding factor is whether or not the owner can do some or most of the maintenance.