The B12 (XII) Forum, home of the 'Front Porch, y'all' at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I was just pointing out that, the most popular by the masses isn't anything to be proud of

kinda like bud light

or Walmart

or McDonalds

From what I can tell, most cars today are highly reliable.  You can get a clunker from anyone.  You might buy Honda that has problems and a Toyota that runs for half a million miles, or vice versa.  Our GTI never had anything go wrong, so far, except two tires that got nails or something.

It's really a Porsche of course ...

just what kind of beer did that Porsche drink

From what I can tell, most cars today are highly reliable.  You can get a clunker from anyone.  You might buy Honda that has problems and a Toyota that runs for half a million miles, or vice versa.  Our GTI never had anything go wrong, so far, except two tires that got nails or something.

It's really a Porsche of course ...

you seem to be harder on tires than average Joe

you seem to be harder on tires than average Joe

A tire picked up a nail somewhere too close to the sidewall.  Then my wife hit something that tore the tire up, complete flat.  I actually changed the tire for the spare.  The car now has about 31 K miles on it, the tires look decent still.  Sometimes the unlock feature doesn't unlock and I have to use the key fob, oh misery.

My step son drove us back from Orlando with it once, he has a heavy foot, we were going over 100 much of the way.

The GTI was built in Mexico.  I think the drive train is sound, nothing exceptional to it.  

My only horror was my daughter's cursed Nissan Juke. I see plenty of them around, so they must be majority OK, but I keep running into too many Nissan specific engineering bugs - meaning curious, non-standard design decisions that weren't reliable. Most of these tend to be related to cooling systems in either/both engine or transmission.

World and US specific emission and safety standards being what they are, there's likely only a few design decisions that meet those. Because of those, body sizes, engine designs, and other basic mechanical implementations are all about equal - there's just not many ways to optimize what must legally be present for mass sales. Couple that with global sourcing of parts and further optimized assembly practices, and most mass produced passenger vehicles start to be very similar is make up and reliability.

Of course, since everything is automated, you can get gremlins when the automation doesn't quite get there. For two weeks, a robot isn't quite in spec, so a wiring harness doesn't land exactly behind the heat shield. Maybe 5% of the vehicles in that run are affected, and only 10% of those will show symptoms if they're shipped to Houston, TX, and operated in harsh environments. By that time, the problem (which wouldn't necessarily show up as a problem) was corrected at the factory. Almost impossible to chase down as to why.

Yeah, I'm throwing that out there because most people don't have a feel for tiny (or huge) numbers. I found out from my mechanic that the rear drums on my Corolla belong to the 1/2 year of 2010 that Toyota sourced brackets from a different supplier. They work with the OEM shoes just fine, but the "premium" shoes are slightly too large to fit the drum.
It's that sort of thing that makes the vast majority of the cars work correctly in most of the situations. QC won't notice. Later, there will be just enough early or unconventional failures that the model will develop a reputation.