I wonder if BMW and Benz will do something about this.
It used to be that German cars have great reliability

http://www.forbes.com/2005/07/01/cx_...featslide.html

 

The Euro luxury car companies need to hire some Japanese electrical engineers for their electrical systems. That is unacceptable, yet people are buying them at an unheard of rate....

 

They never really had great reliability, it was just that the cars were nice/expensive enough that you really wanted to keep them running. You did all the little things the dealer said where as you may not have been so kind to your domestic car (really weren't any Japanese cars in the US at the time). One other thing the Germans did do, they (at least MB) spent a lot of time tweaking and inspecting the car after manufacturing rather than just building it and shipping it.

So the story goes...
About the time Lexus was launched a MB exec was bragging about how 1/3 of the cost to build a MB was double checking everything to make sure it was right. A Lexus exec went on to brag that a Lexus cost 1/3 as much to make as a MB. I honestly don't know if this is true but it gives you an idea why the Germans were having problems. They didn't practice quality manufacturing like the US and Japanese did, ie build it right the first time (remember that up through the 1960's US cars were generally the most reliable, best built cars on the road). Every time the Germans found a problem they just added another inspection step. Few defects out the door but at a very large price.

 

It's pretty obvious that Mercedes and BMW feel more pressure to push the envelope of how many electronic gadgets they can put in their cars than they do to improve reliability. For some reason computers have a different standard of bugginess and that is making its way into cars...

I would also note that when they say "below average", they mean below average for similar cars of the same model year. Cars in general are probably getting more reliable, so this might simply indicate they are not keeping up with their rivals.

I think the general high standard of reliability in today's cars is taken for granted, raising expectations of increasingly picky consumers. I have colleagues who are unhappy with the reliability of their Toyotas because they have experienced things like:

a) a dead battery
b) a leaking A/C condenser (punctured by road debris)
c) worn out brakes

but umm... which of those would be the fault of Toyota?

Peter