Gentlemen, thank you for your replies. I'm not so sure that the example has no relation to a vehicle that is used as a sales tool. If the vehicle is out of service, it's not being used and does not provide the service for which it was procured; that's downtime in my book.

As far as the extended warranty is concerned, I considered it, but rejected it based on assumed risk/loss. Assuming the warranty cost $3k or so, I don't see how the purchase of it would get me $15k more. Especially with my original plan to keep the vehicle beyond 100k miles as at that time, any extended warranty has no resale value, so the expense of the extended warranty is viewed as a crap shoot; i.e. will I spend more than the cost of the extended warranty over the next 50k miles? Possible, but I think not, that's why I didn't go for it.

JCL's comment has merit and is what I was looking for. The real question in that scenario is what is the vehicle actually worth with and without an extended warranty at that time. Does a vehicle sold at an auction get a premium if it has an extended warranty?

And Ard, good point and thanks for clarifying, the maintenance I was referring to includes unexpected costs incurred by stuff not working like it should.

As to the diesel vs gas argument, you've stated that you like gas and I appreciate that, but fueling up at the station represents "downtime" and I can tell you that I spend less time there than I did with my 3.0.