Take your pick: 2014 Mirage or 2005 Phaeton
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2014 7:41 am
So the Phaeton seems like a good candidate to discuss one of my pet peeves: the association of material quality or "perceived design quality" to actual quality/reliability. The two concepts have nothing to do with each other. Here's a car with wonderful materials, and with no detail too small to receive scrutiny at its operation/design/appearance. The tendency is to translate that into a sentiment that this car will last a long time. But this is a terrible car to buy used despite the rock bottom prices, because it's not considered reliable nor is it affordable to repair or even really maintain (side note: look up what German car people consider "maintenance" and be horrified).
Perhaps my conclusion is, people want the vehicle to feel fancy and also WANT that to translate into something of material value (i.e. reliability/durability or otherwise longevity) but it just doesn't. And so I will continue to be annoyed by this false association. The biggest culprit is European cars, of course, most of them turning into big piles of shit after 100k. Yet the irony is, American vehicles seem to have this reputation instead (perhaps mainly by Europeans).