I agree. I was recently in the market for a car and I think the best bang for your buck would be a certified pre-owned Honda, 3-5 years old, less than 50k mileage, and last year of its body style. A CPO 2015 Honda Civic with ~35k miles could be had for $11-14k in California. 31/41MPG, cheap to repair, extremely reliable.

I think toyota beats honda in quality. If you go here:

https://www.carcomplaints.com/Honda/Accord/ you can see that when you compare cars with similar sales volume like the accord and camry at least the last 5 or 6 years toyota has won.

We studied the Toyota quality system in my business classes. They put a lot of emphasis on quality. They use the teachings of Edward Demings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming).

My family and I have also had great experience with Honda over the years, specifically Civic, CR-V and Fit. The reliability is extraordinary anecdotally and then 4-5 years ago (haven't checked since) it was top rated by those industry reliability ranking surveys, JD Power I believe. Not sure how reliable those studies are or what the current state is now. Also the prices of Honda seem to have been creeping up over the years, especially CR-V so it's hard to actually give a real full life cost answer, you could get lucky with a cheaper upfront car. If you value your time though get something that has a proven record for being reliable.