Oh FFS. Fine, if the fanboys demand it I'll do a personal use comparison.
What do you do in your Accord? You commute in it, or something along those lines, and that's probably about it. How much back seat wear is it getting? You got kids fighting back there? Do you stick your new dryer on the roof or do you pay the $20 for delivery? Your peers probably answer those questions about the same way. Meanwhile, several tax brackets down things are way different. Some single mom's four kids are doing their best impression of UFC in the back of her '09 CVT Altima, no wonder the seat is ripped, the floor contains a dozen types of dried soft drink syrup and the "window lock" switch is worn out by 100k. The differences only get wider as you start considering vehicles that are sold as having a lot of utility (wagons, SUVs, minivans), at the lower price tiers people size these vehicles to be just barely enough for what they want to do. At the high end people are buy way more vehicle than they need.
Let's even remove brand from the equation. How many grand Marquis do you see on the road these days? Probably 2 for every non-cop and non-ex-cop Crown Vic you see. Do you think that is in any way representative of the sales numbers when those things were rolling off the line back in the day? Of course not. Vics out-sold Grand Marquis and Town Cars by a wide margin. But a greater fraction of 'Vic buyers rode them hard and put them away wet with the intention of getting something else around 100-200k. The older, wealthier Grand Marquis buyers did the maintenance on schedule and kept them in good order so they lasted longer.
A key mechanism of "lasting longer" is price. People have different expectations and give different treatment to a car depending on price. So you trade in your Accord or whatever, it's in great shape. It goes on the used car lot for a lot of $$. So that ensures the the statistical next buyer is more well off, expecting it to last longer and therefore more willing to care for it. Meanwhile the guy that buys the Altima from the above example pays pennies for it and is expecting it to go maybe 50k before needing something big at which point he intends to dump it. So he's not gonna fix that window lock switch. He's gonna have no qualms about letting his dog f-up the already torn back seat. He's also gonna skip the transmission fluid changes and air filter and generally neglect the car because there's no reason not to if you intend on dumping it in short order.
You can run the same comparison on '00s Impalas and the Buick equivalent (both generally regarded as supremely reliable cars). The Impalas got beat and thrown away. The Buicks are still around (proportionally).
You don't think Ford, or GM, or whoever, makes reliable models for the same reason you'd never consider buying a house anywhere other than a good school district. It's a self-reinforcing expectation foisted upon you by the kind of people you surround yourself with.