Reliability of European Makes and cars in general

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Originally Posted by edyvw
It is hard to explain people that Japanese manufacturers in Europe are less trusted than European in North America. European market requires highly sophisticated engines due to high gas prices, speeds etc. That is when this "legendary" Japanese reliability goes to the wind. One thing though where Japanese are famous in Europe is rust.


This.

Having lived in the UK for over 10 years, you'd be hard pushed to find an unreliable VW or Skoda, which made up most of the cars on the road followed closely by Renault and Peugeot. Almost every taxi was a Skoda, save for those driven by immigrants who were heavily clung to the Toyota Avensis. If memory serves me right, Nissan was the most popular Japanese brand but nowhere near as popular as a VW.

Reliability, particularly for diesel engines, is way up there. Upscale, you had a lot of Mercedes and BMWs on the road. True, Renaults used to rust just as bad as the Japanese cars, but I don't ever recall seeing rust that bad on the German makes to begin with.

Also, you'd be hard pushed to find a Japanese hatch that's as fun to drive as something like a VW Golf. You had Suzuki and Subaru, who were rather competitive in that segment, but people still put the money down for a Golf.

If I was in the market for a brand new sedan at this time, I'd be all over a Passat and skip everything else. There's really nothing American I find appealing anymore. Maybe the Impala, but that's gone the way of the dodo bird soon.
 
Originally Posted by KrisZ
Originally Posted by Alfred_B
Having lived in Europe, I don't recall us putting Japanese cars on a pedestal for reliability and putting down Euro cars. It was a mixed bag with FIATs and Toyota Hilux being the most long lived. Not sure why FIAT had such longevity, though. Pandas and Unos were quite good cars

Yup, Europeans at least have some sense left to support their own manufacturing base. North American customers were convinced that Japanese car manufacturers are the gods of automotive world. Yet, these supposedly superior machines have yet to make a significant dent in the European market.

I'm curious as to how much is 'support...manufacturing base', vs the sheer variety of cars available to European drivers? Seat, Skoda, Citroen/Peugeot, etc. the niche brands (Morgan, Lotus-full range) are available there as well as many models and engine choices from the global brands that are not available here. I agree that there is certainly a strong loyalty to the locals, especially in certain countries, but variety has to play a strong part. As far as N American customers being convinced that the Japanese were 'gods', unfortunately there was a time when the US domestics were doing most of the convincing.

I always tried to rent a Citroen or Peugeot there..maybe I have weird taste.
 
I did own a VW, I very much liked it, but I wasn't in a position to work on it, and wound up routinely driving out of state to get a good trusted mechanic to work on it (diesel engine). I managed to avoid electrical problems but it still had the typical amount of work required--once it hit 100,000 miles on the clock it needed something every year (was doing 32+k per year at the time). A repair per year isn't that bad, really, and a few of them were routine (timing belts say, or perhaps struts). At the end, when I got out past 300k, I took a sober look at what was around the corner for work, and decided to move on (injectors at $700 a pop, rear axle that was sagging, rust). Its replacement vehicle was bought with the hopes of something I could more easily work on myself, and get serviced at any corner garage.

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I tend to shop based on TCO and cost/mile. I tend to regret my buying decisions when I shop on any other metric.
 
I haven't owned my 2009 BMW for a year yet, but I have been working on friend's/family's BMWs, Mercedes, and VW's for a few years now.

There are two things I have seen that have made these cars "less reliable". The first being the cars have more complexity, but the second being that since they are more complex, they are less tolerant of shoddy work done by hack mechanics.

Here is an example:

My neighbor has a 2004 330xi BMW. The car has been relatively reliable, but before I started servicing it, she was having a few issues with it. It started with a leaking oil filter housing gasket, and a leaking radiator hose. Pretty insignificant easy fixes in the grand scheme of things, and common on a car with 100k+ miles. The car was taken to an independent shop that clearly had no business working on ANY vehicle, never mind a BMW, and the nightmare started. What could've been fixed for under $100 DIY turned into a $1000 bill and in the end it was still leaking oil, and still leaking coolant. I look at it and pretty much every bolt this shop touched was stripped or cross threaded, and the plastic cooling connectors on the hoses were cracked and leaking. They also managed to break vacuum lines and an electrical connector. She was extremely upset since she drove her car into the shop with two small leaks, and left with a check engine light.

I fixed the car in a weekend, and it has literally needed just fluid changes and brakes since with over 160k+ miles now.

My sister's 2013 Jetta is a perfect example of this as well. Car runs fine for over a year in my care, she gets the oil changed at a quick lube and comes back with a stripped oil pan drain plug, and a plastic oil filter housing that is leaking and warped.
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Originally Posted by fdcg27
Originally Posted by StevieC
I respect your opinion, however, mine is different from seeing what came through the door at my dad's shops and in what volumes and what trends of the same problem. Yours is based on personal experience with a lot less sample data being your own vehicles and your own limited experiences.

It's fine and given what you were exposed to it has shaped your view but what I'm saying is that if you saw what I did in the same number of vehicles it would be different. People bring you their broken vehicles and trends appear. It's far different than seeing the good ones you own personally which can be different then the trend out there in general with a specific vehicle make / model / auto-maker.

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You focus on a small part of my post but even there fail to grasp the larger point.
Resale value, lease residuals as well as the very large scale fleet experience reflected in CR's reliability surveys all support the point that these Japanese nameplates of the nineties were simply more durable and reliable than either European or US domestic brand cars.
Beyond that, they were nicer in and out, they were more entertaining to drive and they offered better performance and fuel economy.
That this continues is reflected in any comparison of a Camry or an Accord with a Fusion or a Malibu.
The American makers have long proclaimed that the superiority of the Japanese brands is an artifact of the past, but the metal available at the dealers contradicts that claim.
I Illustrated that in comparing my Hybrid Accord with the hybrid offerings from GM and Ford, which offer both inferior fuel economy and acceleration.
The American models aren't an especially great value proposition either and with Toyota and Honda both having built vehicles in this country for many years now, the argument that GM and Ford have to bear heavy legacy costs wears a little thin, particularly since GM washed its hands of most of these costs in its packaged bankruptcy filing and Chrysler did the same.
The Japanese makers have simply done a better job of managing their businesses in the past four decades than have GM, Ford and whatever what remains of Chrysler is calling itself these days.
Superior management brings superior product built with superior control of costs and it has always been just that simple.

Resale value and lease residuals are subject to what someone is willing to pay for the used vehicle and this is based on consumers perception and willing to pay more for what they perceive is better quality and not necessarily so. Look at the inflated housing markets. People paying millions for garden shed sized dumps because it's in a metropolitan area. It doesn't make it a better house, it just happens to be valued higher because there is the perception that the resale value will be higher in the future than other areas. This speculation drives the resale values just the same.

I'll give you another example... Hyundai doesn't hold its resale value or residuals just like a domestic branded vehicle yet they continually score really high in the quality rankings and have been proven to be reliable as their Japanese competitors. Again it's customer perception that it's a "lesser" brand so they aren't willing to pay as much for it even though the performance is just as good. (And before anyone goes arguing about their recent engine failures I will bring up the Toyota sludge monsters in comparison showing all OE's have challenges from time to time).
 
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Originally Posted by jeepman3071

There are two things I have seen that have made these cars "less reliable". The first being the cars have more complexity, but the second being that since they are more complex, they are less tolerant of shoddy work done by hack mechanics.

Indeed. When I bought my VW I did a lot of reading, and that was one thing pointed out time and again. Incompetent dealers, and watch out for hack garages. VW diesel would not take kindly to sub-par maintenance. My car wound up reasonably fine--I realize some have had the opposite experience, and I suspect there's always the lemon (or star).
 
My take?

The US manufacturers seemed to literally go out of their way to destroy the equity they had in their brand name and designs. Plenty of things could have been done right, but just weren't. Their refusal to acknowledge certain markets (small car, especially) just because it wasn't their cup of tea was especially ridiculous.

Japanese cars in the 90s were Gods. Anybody remember what it was like to drive a K-Car, American Escort, or Cavalier from that era? Remember what they looked like? There were a few standout versions, but most were awful.

Euro car reliability has taken it's hits from part pricing as much as anything. It's hilarious and scary what some common parts have cost.

Electrical issues? Yeah, I'll go with that. I had a Mercedes with the disintegrating wiring. It's more common for me to see an older German car with it's dash lit up like Christmas than not.
 
"The US manufacturers seemed to literally go out of their way to destroy the equity they had in their brand name and designs. Plenty of things could have been done right, but just weren't. Their refusal to acknowledge certain markets (small car, especially) just because it wasn't their cup of tea was especially ridiculous."



Spot on. The US automakers declared that Americans still wanted big cars. Their focus on the domestic market left them far behind the others who were thinking global. Then, when they realized the error of their ways they focused on little things like the number of cup holders instead of more important reasons. When it came down to marketing smaller cars they made deals with the foreign companies to rebrand their automobiles instead of coming up with their own ideas.
 
Originally Posted by DoubleWasp
My take?

The US manufacturers seemed to literally go out of their way to destroy the equity they had in their brand name and designs. Plenty of things could have been done right, but just weren't. Their refusal to acknowledge certain markets (small car, especially) just because it wasn't their cup of tea was especially ridiculous.

Japanese cars in the 90s were Gods. Anybody remember what it was like to drive a K-Car, American Escort, or Cavalier from that era? Remember what they looked like? There were a few standout versions, but most were awful.

Euro car reliability has taken it's hits from part pricing as much as anything. It's hilarious and scary what some common parts have cost.

Electrical issues? Yeah, I'll go with that. I had a Mercedes with the disintegrating wiring. It's more common for me to see an older German car with it's dash lit up like Christmas than not.

Not only that, they were trying to convince rest of the world that they are wrong. Look what GM did to SAAB and Opel? Ford had some really good cars in Europe in 1990's, but yet, they decided not to bring all the tech they had there to US. Luckily Ford did not try to export American models to Europe, as probably someone else would own now European branch of Ford, thing that happened to Opel.
Chrysler is even worse. They brought Grand Cherokee with 5.2 V8 and told people: here you go, this is vehicle you should own. That was even good. Then they brought JEEP Commander. I remember Auto Motor und Sport testing it among other SUV's similar size, and while other managed to brake in wet in 60-70m, Commander managed to brake in 182m. The amount of negligence in those cars is astounding.
 
Originally Posted by DoubleWasp
My take?

The US manufacturers seemed to literally go out of their way to destroy the equity they had in their brand name and designs. Plenty of things could have been done right, but just weren't. Their refusal to acknowledge certain markets (small car, especially) just because it wasn't their cup of tea was especially ridiculous.

Japanese cars in the 90s were Gods. Anybody remember what it was like to drive a K-Car, American Escort, or Cavalier from that era? Remember what they looked like? There were a few standout versions, but most were awful.

Euro car reliability has taken it's hits from part pricing as much as anything. It's hilarious and scary what some common parts have cost.

Electrical issues? Yeah, I'll go with that. I had a Mercedes with the disintegrating wiring. It's more common for me to see an older German car with it's dash lit up like Christmas than not.

Japanese manufacturers still have that problem in some parts of Europe. In 90's owning a Japanese cars, any car, in Europe amounted to fixes on par with S class in US. People would run away from them like they have plague, unless they rusted out before they could be sold as used.
 
Originally Posted by PimTac
Kind of like some German cars in the US that have the reliability of a frozen burrito.


I suspect part of it is that many Americans think cars should need nothing more than an oil change whenever they remember that maybe the oil has been in there for a couple of years too long, whereas most Europeans are happy to pay for whatever maintenance the car actually needs. While Americans make jokes about Fiat reliability, mine in the UK were always 99.99% reliable so long as they were serviced properly.
 
Originally Posted by kschachn
99.99% reliable? How did you measure that?

2 nines for an automobile is amazing.

A bit of fishing going on I think.

Since others are touting their personal experiences, I can say that I have owned Japanese makes exclusively for 27 years now with nothing more than normal maintenance and oil changes.

Everyone has their brand bias. Nothing wrong with that.
 
Originally Posted by kschachn
99.99% reliable? How did you measure that?


Drove one for over ten years and the only time it unexpectedly ended up in a garage was when the twenty-year-old gearbox failed. Unlike my Rover, it was a car that I could jump into and drive to the other end of the country without worrying that I'd have to get towed back.

Since the gearbox replacement took about three days, that would mean it was only about 99.92% reliable. But my original post was just a guess, not a math exercise.

The other one never had anything go wrong unexpectedly, but I only had it for a couple of years.
 
Originally Posted by emg
Originally Posted by PimTac
Kind of like some German cars in the US that have the reliability of a frozen burrito.


I suspect part of it is that many Americans think cars should need nothing more than an oil change whenever they remember that maybe the oil has been in there for a couple of years too long, whereas most Europeans are happy to pay for whatever maintenance the car actually needs. While Americans make jokes about Fiat reliability, mine in the UK were always 99.99% reliable so long as they were serviced properly.


Not the case at all. People have simply been jumped too many times upon discovering that many Euro cars used Buck Rodgers tech in systems where American cars had a rod or a hose that was easy to access.

Since all makes are getting that ridiculous, only the cost is an issue now, but there were some bad ones.

Friend of mine wanted to sell me his GTi long time ago. I was hanging out with him one day when his thermostat went bad. I volunteered to help him change it. Had I know that VWs idea of a thermostat was placing it under the engine, on the inlet side, jammed in the middle of a "Saw" level death trap, I would have just walked home from his place. On my Mazda I had, it was two bolts up top and a gasket.

I did not buy his car, or any other VW. The amount of repairs that required many VW owners to handcuff themselves to their VAG-COM (love the name BTW) did nothing to endear me any further.

That's a major factor in what people determine as unreliable. Big dollar or Slaughterhouse repairs only have to come so often for people to get disgusted and walk away.

Obviously, I still mess with the Euro stuff, but no way am I going to pass outside of a warranty with any of them still in my ownership unless it is a truly rare, true exotic collectible (ain't got one of those yet).

Exceptions there are. Know two owners of VW diesel wagons who have gone ridiculous mileage with few repairs.

The Euro marques also did a lot of damage to themselves in the 70s and 80s by grossly underestimating the heat/traffic/humidity factors in the United States. There is a reason why Euros started testing their Euro models in FL and AZ before releasing them in the US. Porsche famously and fortuitously discovered it's tail lights melted off of the 911 in US heat before releasing to the US. Jaguar unfortunately discovered after the fact that their engines overheat and blow in NYC tunnels.

Surprisingly, a colleague of mine has had his Maserati GT for 8 years and has only done oil changes, filter changes, and belts over 67k miles. It's what inspired me to take the plunge. Small matter to me, though. I plan to go through toy cars like this frequently. Chances are, something else will catch my eye before the year is out. Lot cheaper and easier than frequently changing women.
 
Pretty much all car manufacturers collaborate with each other in one form or another. Sure, there is a healthy competition between them, but they have learned that dead-throat style of competing is not good for them and quite expensive in the long run.

So why spend all this time and energy defending or criticizing faceless corporations and their products? What sort of end result is desired here?
 
Biggest POS manufactured product I ever owned, nothing else even comes close - CVCC era Honda. So bad I will not have anything but dripping disdain and burning contempt for them to my last breath. So bad I have only owned one Japanese car ever since, and I bought it for someone else to drive. So bad that I may have my unyielding and uncompromising hatred for anything Honda cut deep in granite as an epitaph on my tombstone so I can hate them for a few more millenia.

Most maintenance free car I ever owned: 1) 08 Pontiac ( Holden ); 2) '04 Jaguar Xj8. Zero repairs on the Holden; 2 warranty items on the Jag - lazy fuel sending unit, and rattly seat belt tensioner.

The '09 Torrent GXP has needed a window regulator ( warranty ) and a few batteries - not too bad for a ten year old, but it blew one of the fuel pumps a few months ago, dropping it down some on the trouble free scale ...

edit: I'm surprised none of you Euro bashers have mentioned Nikasil. Not that it was the manufacturers fault. Makes me wonder how much some of you actually know about Euro marques.
 
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Originally Posted by Win
edit: I'm surprised none of you Euro bashers have mentioned Nikasil. Not that it was the manufacturers fault. Makes me wonder how much some of you actually know about Euro marques.


BMW had this problem in the 1990's and I figured they didn't conduct extensive road testing in the United States. Of course BMW endured a HPFP recall with the N54 (2007-2010?) engine and I know they road tested that car in the US.
 
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