You mention "import" luxury brands with all these gizmos, but don't forget that Cadillac has all that same stuff on thier cars as well and they still placed higher than just about every luxury brand. One could also make an assumption that since Cadillac buyers(up until recently) have been mostly the elderly, they are more nitpicky and even when the slightest thing that doesn't seem absolutly perfect, they bring it in to be checked. This is the case for my grandparents and some other elderly people that I know.

 

Many people have made statements like this throughout this thread. What a crock. Electronic components should be the most reliable components in a car. They aren't wear items like the suspension or the engine. Having been an Electrical Engineer for the last 4.5 years, there is nothing more reliable than electronic components if designed well. If the primary problems with higher end cars is electronic in nature such as navigation or more complex embedded control, this is due to poor design/manufacture, nothing else.

 

That's BS. If I'm paying a huge amount of money for that stuff, it had better as hell work! And if the stuff can't meet typical standards for reliability, then it has no place on the car. Heck, look at Lexus - they've got some fancy options and don't have problems like M-B.

dnovotny, I'm also a EE in the auto industry, and I agree with you 100%. My stuff works. However, in the benchmarking that I've done, I've found an unbelievable amount of crap out there, and from guys that should know better. With American cars, it seems that electrical problems are rarely the fault of a defective electronics module (it's usually something electromechanical like a switch, actuator, or harness assembly), where as some of our European friends are making some very avoidable mistakes in their module design and will appartently source the production of non-critical modules to any jackass with a picnic table and a soldering iron. The Japanese seem to ensure quality by avoiding complexity - not a bad thing to do if you're primarly concerned with going from Point A to Point B.

 

Since I live in the Bay Area, many of my friends and coworkers own Japanese cars. I think the commonality between all cars are failures with electromechanical components. This is an area I don't know much about, but I wonder if reliability would be improved if they stressed the part (like one burns-in a uP at high voltage and temperature) to weed out the marginal units. Of course, as always, that adds cost.

 

They do have a lot of cool features, but MB and BMW always seem to be one-up on them. In other words, if you see a new technology in MB and/or BMW, it'll probably be 2-5 years before you see it in a competing Lexus model.

They get critisized a lot for that by the media and owners. But I think that's the very same reason they have such a good reliability reputation, they wait until the technology is near bullet-proof before they'll send it their customer's way.

 

Yes, the BMW and MB's may get the new equipment, but I don't think anyone wants to buy one of those just to be a guinea pig for their new technology until they get it right.

As for the complexity issue justifying the increase in repairs, think about this. The space shuttle is a complex machine, so, I guess we should just look the other way when one blows up, because it's very complex and that stuff is just going to happen.

 

They do test the technology extensively. However when you test for 100,000 hours in a test facility, it's still not going to point out NEARLY as many flaws as 100,000 vehicles driving all over the planet 15,000 miles a year per vehicle with all sorts of types of owners, driving styles, environments, etc. I guess they could give 100,000 cars away to people to test out before they released the 'finalized' product, but unfortunately unlike software and some other types of products, creating a large test fleet representative of the population gets to be cost prohibitive.

Do you have any idea how redundant and obssesive NASA is when they design space shuttles? Do you know what their R&D and quality control budget is? I don't know the exact numbers, but I think if you wanted a car company to build a car with similar design tolerances to NASA's space shuttle, you'd probably be buying a Ford Taurus for right around the price that a Bently or Rolls Royce costs today.

 

Na - what you get with electromechanical components isn't really an infant mortality issue, but rather wear-out or degradation over time that results in a latent field failure. Most of the time, it's really a design flaw rather than a failure of the production process.

Threxx, you're pretty much dead-on with your assessment. The Japanese very rarely introduce a new technology to the market; that's not to say that they wait for others to act and then steal their ideas, but instead simply an indicator of their desire to see the maturation process all the way through. You're starting to see the same out of the American OEMs, after some of the notable disasters in the past 20 years or so.