SptBiz

I'm wondering how BMW and Audi quality is holding up . Anyone that has taken a good hard look at these competitors please let me know your opinion. No more buying on PAST reputation for me. IMO too many car companies, and companies in general, are currently putting out poor quality products while milking the quality image associated with their name. Apparently Mercedes Benz has become a good example of this.

SteVTEC

Go to your local bookstore and checkout the Consumer Reports 2002 Annual Auto Issue and you can lookup reliability data for yourself. You can also go to JD Power & Associates web page and they also list "top level" reliability data online, but it's not nearly as detailed as the Consumer Reports stuff.

German car reliability in general is "average" but still nowhere close to Japan. Additionally, when they break down it costs an arm and a leg to fix them. American cars are only slightly worse reliability wise nowadays but are much cheaper to fix. The weak spot in pretty much any German car is the electronics. Germans still can't build anything electrical that works. For very long.

If reliability is something of importance to you, stick with Japan. Reliability is an absolute requirement for me so I only consider Japanese cars.

PlanoSER

i would steer far away from German cars after my experience with a VW Passat I owned.. many expensive problems and headaches with that car. Just my 2cents

ajahearn

iTrader: (3)

This is based on people I know rather than my own experience. BMW's follow a similar pattern to the Japanese car's. By this I mean that flagship cars have very good marks, their low end cars have average marks. Most people compare the 3-series to the Maxima. The Maxima is the flagship for Nissan whereas the 7-series are the flagship for BMW. A large number of people where I work get 3 or 5-series (leased) cars through the company. The ratings have been okay to good. The common complaint about service is the waiting to get an appointment.

Audi's on the other hand are not so well regarded. They are notoriously towards the lower end but again the comparison is made against the A4/S4/A6/S6 cars, and only the S8 really matters. Several people I know who've bought A4's and S4's have had quality problems. Compounding this is that getting parts is a big problem. There are fewer dealers (compared to Nissan or BMW) and the wait for some parts can be several weeks. Another common complaint is the wait for an appointment.

While I agree with your quality assessment you have to consider what you are paying. A low end Mercedes is just that, a low end car. It doesn't matter that it costs twice as much as a low end Japanese car. You are paying for the "status" as well as the car.

BuddyWh

BMW and Audi have excellent engineering quality. In fact, you should say clearly superior and mean it, without exaggeration.

But manufacturing quality, well that is at best good, usually down-right average. And replacement parts are extremely expensive, especially if you demand only OEM.

Their problems are typical of most things Teutonic... they are over-engineered, making for extremely good, clever designs that perform very well when everything works, but are complicated and/or demand higher- precision tolerances. Because they are complicated they are harder to manufacture and have more "opportunities for error", to use a Six-Sigma quality term.

Japanese manufacturing has focused on design simplicity and "idiot proofing" as the first criteria to achieve high quality manufacture.

BuddyWh