I had a Ford Contour that went 187,000 miles before getting rid of it. My only major fix was replacing the timing belt, and I did that myself.
You had the four-cylinder Zetec engine, obviously. I had the same engine in a 1996 Mercury Mystique (which is, for all intents and purposes, the same car as the Contour, just a little bit fancier). The Mystique is, I think, the very best car I have ever had, but I always considered its use of a rubber timing belt to be a serious weakness. It's a bitch to have it replaced. I think it is very, very bad engineering for a part that is known to need to be replaced routinely to be such a big job to replace.
My present car, a 1997 Ford Contour, has the six-cylinder Duratec, which does not have this weakness. I think the biggest weakness of the Duratec-powered Contour comes from trying to cram too much engine into too small a space, making it very, very difficult to perform any repairs on it. It really makes me miss my first car, a 1969 Falcon station wagon, which was very old by the time my parents gave it to me, and which broke down quite often, but it was usually very easy to repair whatever ailed it.
It [an Infiniti] probably uses a $600 alternator as well.
I'm reminded of the very first non-American vehicle my parents ever had, a 1975 Toyota pickup truck that an uncle gave us after he upgraded to a better (American, this time) pickup truck. On one occasion, my father tasked me with replacing the alternator in it. I went to a parts store, with a blank check in hand, to buy the alternator. I don't remember the numbers, but price of the alternator turned out to be on the order of about three or four times what we thought it should be. I had to call my father at work, and ask him if we really wanted to pay that much for an alternator. He told me instead to ask for a “rebuild kit”, which ended up costing about what we thought a whole new alternator ought to cost, and consisted of the specific parts likely to wear out in the alternator. I ended up also needing to buy a few more tools to open the old alternator, after which it was easy enough to apply the rebuild kit. The repair was easy enough, other than the “sticker shock” aspect of buying the parts and tools.