I haven't heard any person or car review say that the quality in domestic brands is better than in German cars. When you look at interior materials or overall refinement, German cars come out ahead. Also, I don't know what you mean by paying for servicing, BMW offers free scheduled maintenance on all their cars, and I don't think mercedes or VW cost anymore than american brands to service.
When a brake job on a volkswagen tuarag runs $1500, i'd say its a little nuts (b/c you can't just replace the pads/resurface the rotors like on most cars). Had a bmw that had ridiculous service/repair costs. I bought my first american car (lincoln) and a volvo (if you think of that as American since ford owned). No issues after 45k miles on the lincoln. I consciously bought US though my next car, depending on the type may or may not be. I'm a little turned off on the BMWs b/c of their service costs as well as reliability issues. As they say, if you can afford a BMW, you can afford to fix it. Of course feeling like an idiot every service/repair call doesn't feel great, so thats a different issue. As for this perception gap, this is why GM is giving the 100k powertrain warranty. GM figures it will cost them $300 a car to offer this, but the perception by customers is much higher b/c they think GM cars are so bad. In reality, this is the perfect thing for American car manufacturers to do since it delivers much higher percieved value than actual value.
^^ You are right, German cars are pricey to fix. That's what Hayes was talking about and I agree with that. I thought he meant just regular servicing.
I already adressed that post, I was talking about regular servicing like oil changes, not repairs. If you think American cars are "hands down" better quality than German cars then you really don't know jack about cars.
I remember going to a recruiting session for GM when I was looking for an internship back in college and to me, that's one of the things that stuck out in my mind. One recruiter said something along the lines of GM is consciously trying to hire away from Detroit to diversify it's engineers because it was made up of too many people whole have their parents working at Detroit. What happens is that the kids would get a car every 2/3 years when Dad gets a new car every 2/3 year due to the employee prices that GM gets and/or whatever special deals they have on top of it. Through time, the emphasis on long term reliabillity issue became dampened through this. When I buy a Toyota, I can reasonably believe that it will get to 150K miles without any major troubles. 45K is practically new in my mind. I think Detroit auto makers understands that and like I've said, they've done a lot of good things to try and change. But they will have to take it on the chin for a while before the perception changes. I just hope they don't do something drastic along the way to reverse the process in-order to meet wall street estimates or something.
I agree that 45k is still practically new. I just think the quality spread that people have talked about for years isn't there anymore (to the same extent). However, like someone said, you own these things for years, so it takes a very long time to earn back your reputation since you only buy a few cars in your life.
