lapin_windstar

There's an article in today's Wall Street Journal about why now is a good time for car buyers, btw. Don't know whether that's useful.

RoadWarriorFromLP

Country of origin often doesn't matter so much, although it can indirectly.

Reliability is largely a function of design, engineering and parts quality. Assembly plays a lesser role, and that has more to do with plant management than with the geographic location of the plant.

The VW plant in Puebla, Mexico had a lot of teething problems. It can take years for a plant to run smoothly, and Puebla proved troublesome, although it supposedly is now on par with what you would find in Europe. VW did such a poor job when it had a US plant in Pennsylvania that it eventually shut it down.

VW's are interesting, as they tend not to be reliable, even though the engineering and assembly are often pretty good. Given this, I would blame a lot of the quality problems on its parts and subassemblies, which are bought on the cheap.

VW, following in the footsteps of the Detroit automakers, squeeze their margins out of their suppliers, so of course the suppliers cheapen the parts in order to turn a profit. In addition, VW damaged itself financially with the Phaeton, a horrible expensive disaster that lost the company hundreds of millions, if not more.

As the consumer, you get to pay the price for these ill-advised business practices in the form of breakdowns and downtime. And US VW dealers don't have the best of reputations for service quality.

So I don't think that it matters where your VW was built, it will still be a dice roll. The recent Audis can be better, as their quality control and oversight were separated a few years ago from the VW line, so they now tend to be better built.

But if buying a compact, the Corolla and Civic are the standard for reliability. Most people would consider the Civic to be more fun to drive. It should be noted, though, that the Honda six-speed manual transmissions seem to have reliability issues, which undermines an otherwise bulletproof reputation. Again, it's not a function of where they are built, but the design, so the country of manufacture won't matter.