With buying used I would end up paying half but also getting half the miles out of it.
Well, you still have the full warranty and good mileage which is what you wanted. It's not cheap, but one could argue that you are making payments up front for maintenance payments that a used car would need on the back-end. It's not necessarily cheaper, it's just another way of looking at your payments.
I don't think that you'd get half the miles out of a used vehicle unless it was a serious POS.
For instance, I picked up my 1996 Volvo 960 wagon for $4000 in San Francisco back in 2008. It had 142K miles on it. I now have 206K miles on it and the only required things I've done were shocks, timingbelt (+the pulleys and water pump related to the timingbelt) and tires. I've also done some other upgrades to it, but the *necessary* maintenance has been extremely low and I've actually spent far more in gas on it than I spent buying it.
It gets 23.5mpg average right now, but gas is not only cheap, it's far cheaper than a more expensive car that gets 35mpg. It would take a long time for the added money of a more fuel efficient car to pay itself off.
Here are the results of the oil analysis I just had done at 205000 miles on the Volvo;
http://www.robdiesel.com/wpblog/?p=925 - there's also my mileage log since 2008 to show you the cost of ownership.
I tend to work on my own cars too, so that's a benefit, but I don't see why a Hyundai Sonata, Kia Optima or anything else Asian and reliably couldn't be had for far less than you're paying now and be from 2005ish or so and still provide you with many years of reliable service.
The key is to keep up on the service. Change the oil every 10K, change the timing belt as needed, lubricate joints and shafts etc. Many cars these days die of neglect more than substandard quality.