Right on.
I decided not to go into full rant mode in my earlier post, where I just breezed over my thoughts on third party extended warranties, but now you've primed my pump.
/rantmode
Third party extended warranties of all flavors (not just cars, but on consumer goods) are nothing more than a way to squeeze more profit out of the sale of the item in question.
If you read the small print (all four thousand pages of it), every one of these extended warranties have lists of repairs that are *not* covered by the warranty. Why? Because they have statisticians who's job is to determine what the most likely things are to go wrong. They then give that list to the underwriters, then the underwriters put it in the small print that those repairs are *not* covered.
They also make the claim procedure so unwieldy and lengthy that many people simply give up on trying to get a claim processed. My best friend waited six weeks to get an authorization done on his car, and ended up having to get an attorney involved in order to get his auto repair claim through his extended warranty.
There's a good reason why the majority of the spam calls you guys get right now are people hawking extended vehicle warranties; they are nothing more than a legal scam.
Don't fall for *any* extended warranty on *anything* that you buy. Ever. As BMWM3Man said, put some money away if you think it'll ever need to be repaired.
IMO, you're even better off putting a repair on a high interest credit card and making monthly payments than any extended warranty out there.
/rantmode