CNN/Money: Most Reliable Cars (or) Further Proof Mercedes Makes Crap

Every car has problems.. i mean, i konw some have it more then others, but i think its really difficult to catagorize cars in terms of reliability. if not impossible.. some people call a car unreliable when it needs a new water pump at 20k miles.. thats not unreliable.. annoying, yes.. but.. i dont know.. i mean, it just seems like you always hear people complaining about problems and how cars arn't how they used to be.. cars ALWAYS HAD PROBLEMS.. THEY ALWAYS WILL.. sure, the 68' vette's navigation system never gave my dad an ounce of trouble.. niether did his active body control system.. oh, thats cause he didn't have either.. but you can be sure he had issues with electrical components. problems with his driveline.. ticks that never seemed to go away.. also, my benze would blow the doors of that car.. and look at all it has cramed into its dash.. and its like the same size if not smaller then vettes!! and look at ALL the mercedes can do!! its just amazing how far we've come.. so what if probmes happen.. now if your starter relay keeps going out.. well that is very unreliable but i dont hear of things like THAT iwth MB very often.. usually they are little trivial things or something that doens't actually affect the basic needs of the vehicle..man i'm just all over the place..

OH the killer of them all.. 3 weeks after i get my car.. yeah a lot of you people will shake your heads.. whatever.. i had 20" lorinzer LM-5's on the car.. i was in the fast lane and was about to miss my turn (it was a split to another freeway).. there were no cars, i saw the yellow buckets and used those a reference point as to where an obstical was that i could run into.. or where the split began.. i was going 85 mph and right as i angled my car to make the split i saw that there was a cheese wedge shaped curb that came out like 20 feet from the barrels and was about 3" high and painted the same color as the freeway, i floored it to bring the nose up and turned the wheel to kinda try and go up sideways.. i split the back right barrel of the lorinzer and made a 5 inch dent in the inside rim of the barrel of the front right wheel..

I ran over a CURB at 90 mph with the car lowered past fact. setting and all i needed was an allignment.. no sub frame damage.. no fram damage at all.. no axels ****ed up nothing.. i had mercedes of oakland AND walnut creek look at it.. walnut creek sent it to E-TECH collision where they checked all the frames and gave me a good bill of health.. those cars are build solid.. the important things.. my engine wont go out on me.. maybe my cd changer.. oh and my climate control button fell off.. but they glued it back on.. it doesn't make me hate my benz or the new ones..

they have top of the line saftey/comfort systems and sometimes things on them breake.. but it tells you when it does brake if not before.. and benz usually fixes it for free.. if you buy one out of warrenty yes it can be expensive.. but you did just buy a car for 60k, that was 130K+++ 4 years ago and it has 45k miles on it at 10.5k miles a year.. thats 50% depreciation.. and i still had a warrenty.. my warrenty just came up 6 months ago and they still fixed my susp problem which turned out to be a 7k bill due to what it had effected (the first time).. i just think it all works out.. you buy the car for half the price.. its still a high powered german sports coupe.. and its still cool in all of its original ways..

with all that said, i do scratch my head sometimes wondering why when you do hand over 130k plus whatever, why they cant get everything right.. but who does, and who will? no one.. ther will always be flaws with everything us consumers buy.. especially when we demand bigger and better and more high tech things.. its a balance that we have to learn to live with.. or you can get a camry

 

I found this link on CS's wikipedia page:

http://www.allpar.com/cr.html

 

Thanks for that! Exactly my point, people have different perception about what their car should endure as faults.
As an example, I only changed shock absorbers on one car of mine since I drive (more than 40 years), and that was on the only Japanese car I ever had! The Toyota dealer thought it was OK after 18 months, "Just routine" he said. I thought it was a joke. Well, I had French, German, Polish, British, Swedish, American, Italian cars and never changed a shock on any of those!

With only between 6 and 12% return of survey questionnaires, how can you judge the result fairly.

One thing strikes me, since Mercedes got a fair amount of criticism on this thread; why is it that so many survive for so long, when many so-called reliable cars have joined the great scrapyard in the sky?

I see every day 20 years old Mercs in the street, but not many 20 years old Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, etc... Why is it that old Mercs are so thought of in the third world, where there is hardly any maintainance support, spare parts, etc...? Go to the Middle-East, some part of Africa, it's full of old Mercs! Some of them 40 years old...

 

The Kappa platform has produced some sharp lookin cars.

 

This is not my perception.

The cars that Mercedes turned out prior to 1996 were wonderful. The vehicles coming off the assembly since are of insanely poor quality, especially for the price.

I have owned everything from a 190E 2.3-16 to an SL55. The dropoff in quality is real. And it's a shame.