Comment by KnuthIsGod
9 hours ago
Global sales of Porsche, Audi, Mercedes and BMW brand ( BMW Group sales increased marginally, but includes) have all declined.
The end is in sight for German cars as Chinese made electric cars take over.
I have had several German cars. Never again ! Sticking to Japanese and probably Chinese cars in the future.
German cars were decent once. Now they are notorious for poor long term reliability.
If we're comparing notes, I traded in my Model 3 for a BMW i4 and I couldn't be happier. It's a nicer car and more fun to drive!
JD Power and Consumer Reports both rate BMW above average.
BTW, my impression of BMW maintenance from prior decades is expensive and not great reliability. I care about it less now with EVs because there is so much less regular maintenance. No oil changes, no brake pad changes, etc.
Yep. EVs are a once in a lifetime chance for EU and Chinese manufacturers to catch up again or even leapfrog Toyota. Until recently Toyota was 20 years ahead wrt reliability and upkeep.
Soon, battery weight and performance will be the main differentiator of vehicles.
Not sure they care all that much about reliability. Just being cheap enough is enough
> Soon, battery weight and performance will be the main differentiator of vehicles.
People don't buy Corolla for performance. And even low-end EVs are "enough" thanks to the power coming on from the very lowest RPM. Aside from range all the characteristics are not performance based. It must be big enough, have expected comforts and look nice.
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Counterpoint. After driving my Model 3 in 2022, a colleague bought his first non-BMW: a Tesla Model 3. His only complaints were the seat and the handling. Everything else he liked better about the Tesla.
This from someone who owned three or four BMWs.
You can get a BMW for $40k or $120k. Big spectrum. As another datapoint, I have one of those higher tier BMWs and even the top trim Lucid's interior feels like a downgrade compared to my car. The $50-80k BMWs also feel cheap and crappy to drive when I've tested them. Tesla can't compete on anything except their ADAS which is superior.
If you're transitioning from a barebones 330i then yeah the Tesla is probably better. But it's not even close when you compare to the top end German vehicles.
I would hope a car that costs ~$30k more is nicer and more fun to drive.
I don't mind paying more for a European product, and as for the 'poor long term reliability': we don't know what the long term reliability of Chinese vehicles is yet.
Not that it really matters, my car is 27 years old this year and I won't be getting another one but that has to do with wanting a car that is doing what I want it to do rather than what it wants to do.
I don't know if this is paranoia, but one fear I have for high-tech Chinese products is that if a world war were to start with China, that they'd have the ability to remotely disable these kinds of products.
After the Israeli attack using pagers I think this is no longer paranoid at all.
The same goes for Chinese built cloud connected hardware, especially if it is grid connected, contains heater elements or batteries. Inverters, solar panels, vehicles, 3D printers, the list is endless and all of these are either potential fire starters or ways to destabilize the grid. Used maliciously the potential for misery is pretty large. All this crap that wants to connect to the cloud from a country where your average citizen has very limited access to the internet should give you pause: if the Chinese government thinks these connections are A-ok then they must see some advantage, especially if all the services are supposedly free of charge.
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I do not think it is paranoia. But we can have this from anywhere. American devices, EU devices; if I cannot analyse the firmware, ICs etc, what is going to guarantee these are not remotely exploitable. Even if Porsche never built such a thing on purpose, the car is connected so someone can break in, hack it and do stuff including possible overhead the battery so it ignites.
It does not have to be on purpose quality wise either: I had 2 spicy pillows in my life (and I have a lot of gadgets, including fully Chinese ones); a Samsung flagship phone and a macbook air. Both just unannounced got very hot and broke open: no fire but still... So I would say it is possible for a state actor to remotely hack, take over and ignite your Samsung and Macbook as apparently it can already almost happen without hackers.
What to do about it? Without just fully open sourcing hardware and software, I do not know. I mean that would not help a lot if no one reads it and finds the issues/vulnerabilities, but at least we stand a chance, vs now. Unplugging from internet is not really a thing, although, when it comes to cars and airplanes i would rather see it mandatory non connected.
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it's not paranoia
chips with backdoors which would allow exactly something like that (or many other things) have been found more then once in recent years AFIK
through a fancy personal car stopping working is the least relevant target. Network backbone, smart phones, and other core infrastructure is a much more relevant target. And even for cars all the non-personal vehicles (e.g. ambulance, trucks, police ...) are much more relevant targets.
Certainly anything that downloads over the air updates. I'm not mad that our government turned down import of EVs from a country that became an adversary
Disabling them is one thing. Having them auto-drive to select locations and self-immolate is another entirely.
The reverse is clear for Chinese people. Do you remember when, in the early 2000s, the US sold a Boeing 767 intended for Chinese presidential use, and Chinese authorities later reported finding numerous hidden listening devices on board? There is a Chinese Wikipedia article about the incident [1], but no dedicated English one. More information in English can be found here [2].
[1] https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B1%9F%E6%BE%A4%E6%B0%91%E...
[2] https://www.flightglobal.com/chinese-vip-jet-was-bugged/4121...
Sadly, the US is more likely to at war with Europe than China
Japanese and Chinese are very different buckets. What is the long term reliability of Chinese cars? Nobody knows.
I wouldn't be too concerned.
Hyundai used to be synonymous with "garbage".
People who have purchased Hyundai/Kia products w/ the GDI Theta II engine would, perhaps, take issue with "used to be".
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Yeah maybe I'll get a Chinese car in 50yrs
Porsche / Audi are selling a lot more cars then they were 10-15 years ago. I think they will be okay. Chinese brands will cut into all establish automaker sales, but the German cars have strong brands that symbolize luxury. Look at Land Rover. There are cars are completely unreliable and they are selling more than ever at increasingly ludicrous prices.
I agree with you, but luxury car manufactures largely sell leases. So they are designing their cars for that market.
I am very much interested in electric cars that look like normal cars. I understand the battery changes things. But why they have to shit up the design of 75% of electric cars is nonsensical to me
ICE cars are on the way to becoming obsolete.
Japan doesn't produce many strong competing EVs at the moment.
Why are you sticking with Japanese cars? why not American? But yes definitely Chinese EVs in the future when they come to America/Europe.
americans are junk in comparison
The company that makes my pickup truck is headquartered in the Netherlands.
Suddenly most of the world doesn't care about human rights?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Brazil_working_conditions_...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v5n7w55kpo
yes, because when cars were bad and chinese brands were cheap, it was virtuous to pinpoint human rights vs 'chinese cars are yucky and i want to look cool'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_and_intrinsic_val...
Don't ask german car companies what they were doing between 1939 and 1945
Also don't ask VW what they did in latin America, or east China.
We all know that. Doesn't mean we need to be OK with that forever should any other company attempt that?
No one cared to begin with. Just look up the horrors involved with Apple phones. People want their fancy devices. Doesn't matter if slave labor is involved. Doesn't matter if we need to add nets to prevent laborers from killing themselves instead of putting up with the horrible conditions we force them into.
Are all German cars the same? Is there a reason they all declined together, in your opinion?
no OP, but as someone who comes from a family where German cars were king for several reasons, who have all become disillusioned and now buy Asian cars, where the reason is simple. American style corporate greed infested German auto-manufactures and it shows at every level.
It is most obvious with things like subscription services for basic function, like acceleration or the seat heaters you already paid for, but it has been present in a more insidious way for far longer, like intentionally breaking good design so that small cheap and easy to mass manufacture parts break at predictable schedules. These are then quoted to you at $900+ for a part that will cost you 60 through china, for what is a plastic mould, some magnets and a wire. The cheap replacements work just fine and last just as long.
So, over time, we've become so fed-up with it, and it is a problem present from bmw, vw, audi and beyond, that we just started going with Toyota/Hyundai or Chinese EV's etc, and no one has a gripe since. Repairs when required are cheap and easy, often easily done at home, cars drive almost if not just as well, mileage is comparable, joy of driving is comparable, overall there is simply no value left in German cars beyond the status symbol, something we care little for.
I always loved BMWs from the 80s and 90s, but settled on Volkswagens because I was just a poor teen or early 20 year old. Finally got the means to buy a top of the line X7, and have regretted the purchase for may of the reasons you listed.
The software is garbage, the car is too fancy (electric folding seats) but poorly implemented so it’s just frustrating. Total nanny car, can’t turn off backup beeping alerts. Rear row of seats randomly go to full hot on the climate system.
New battery is $700. Can only use a BMW battery installed by a BMW technician with computer access (they are coded and only a tech with the keys can pair the new battery to your car).
Should have just bought a damned minivan, but the wife likes it and doesn’t want to get rid of it.
The enthusiasts car company is no more.
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I haven't bought German ever, but everything I hear seems pretty negative.
Some of the recent models have plastic timing chain guides and have turned the engine around so that the timing chains are in the back. The only innocent explanation is that the car is only meant to last 10 years at most, so saving the money on plastic instead of metal and screwing whoever owns the car when the timing chains need to be redone (or ruining the engine when the chain fails) is out of scope for their quality team.
There were many older models of BMW that had an electric water pump. If that sounds silly, well, it is. And it failed frequently and was again, very difficult to replace.
I just don't have any respect for German automotive engineering. Reliability is job #1. And the company's themselves, well, "collusive" is a pretty good term. I saw an estimate that German auto industry collusion resulted in about $10k of additional cost per vehicle to U.S. buyers. The cases have somehow been kept quiet, but they've at least been caught holding back innovations until the other automakers have a competitive response, and gaslighting regulators into allowing higher emissions from diesels in the name of reducing the size and filling frequency of the AdBlue tank. I've also heard that there's another layer of this in the parts suppliers. Explains how a wiper motor or wiper body module is somehow hundreds of dollars.
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Hey. He has ancedtoal evidence he used to make a sweeping generalization about all cars based on country even though that grouping has little to no value in the cars themselves.
Does this also apply to electric cars? They use different platforms most of the time.