hale-pope said:
Superiority is not all in the mind, otherwise a Merc would be finished like a Ford but sold for Merc money..... or maybe you think it already is?! As for reliability, all my German cars were more reliable than my Honda so i am going by personal experience.
I didn't say that did I, clearly an S class is going to be vastly superior to a Ford in many ways, it wont be comparable.
But i'm tired of hearing parroted nonsense about how all German cars are superior to everything else on the road when it is clearly is not the case. It's just a case of people thinking they are superior because they are told they are superior by the marketing men and garbage reviews.
I've had a fair amount of experience with VAG cars now and some other Germans cars, many people I know own them and they are not superior in every way to a Honda Accord. VW's ride are very soft and they have very numb handling, Audi's don;t know the meaning of handling all their cars seem to suffer from serious understeer with a ride that is stiffer than a horse and cart. Several Audi's i've been in have had rattles galore, sure some of the switchgear is nice to touch and the doors have dampers that make a nice thunk, but build quality is not there and reliability is dog poor, they seem to be in the garage getting fixed all the time, my bro-in-law has spent hundred to thousands on his A4, yet he insists on keeping it.
The paint on the old VAG cars might have been thick, but they become rusty as hell, the new ones have thin paints now, a lot down to switching to water based painting methods.
The E90 3 series has cheap plastics galore inside. All the customer satisfaction surveys say a lot about german cars too, they are usually dangling right at the bottom.
So yeh it is all in the mind, and flippant comments about how a bloody Golf is better than an Accord is quite frankly in my books... laughable. But people can believe what they want, why do you even drive an Accord if the Passat is superior in every way.