Turn out to be? Dude, I’m already there! 
Tamerlane, as always, you are the voice of reason and moderation.
Q: what’s the difference between a moose and a German car?
A: The moose’s asshole is on its outside.
Some things are just retarded like putting the starter under the intake or having to tear a dashboard out because 2 cents worth of plastic broke on a heater door assembly. I think most of the cost of luxury cars are for the specialized engineering needed to make them hard to work on.
I rented a Mercedes crossover SUV of some type last year in The Netherlands. It was basically a run-of-the-mill, “me too” crossover SUV. The fit and finish wasn’t nearly as good as (say) in a Ford Edge (comparable vehicle), and the satnav was completely unfriendly. It was a gasoline vehicle (not diesel, surprisingly) and got crappy, horrible mileage. The NVH (noise, vibration, harshness) was disappointing. That one vehicle has forever spoiled any positive feelings I may have previously had for “luxury” Mercedes vehicles.
The year before, I’d rented an Opel crossover station wagon in Germany. Opel is a GM product, for which I have very low regard. There’s not really a US car I could compare it to, but man, I loved it! It was diesel, and according to the onboard computer it yielded 43 US mpg despite driving it like an asshole for three weeks. The fit and finish and NVH were better than I’d ever seen on a US GM product.
I didn’t see a lot of American cars in Germany (i.e., genuinely American, that is. Lots of Fords, but those are European Fords, not American Fords). In France, though, and ironically (I thought) there were lots and lots and lots of American SUV’s. I mean real body-on-frame SUV’s. And for some strange reason, lots of Chrysler 300’s.
It doesn’t matter. And you really can’t quantitatively state. All modern cars, plus or minus the error-bars on the statistics gathering are Good, and reliable.
A manufacturer would have to have a significant percentage of thier cars CATCH FIRE (Ferrari anyone?) to get a truly deserved bad rap. Everything else is based on emotions and perceptions and how much money you care to devote to wheeled things.
Or, you know, have their brakes fail while the engine computer decides to accelerate for some unknown reason.
Made in, Austria IIRC.
I think all LX cars are built in Brampton Assy. A few markets with import restrictions get CKD kits from Brampton, but not for most of Europe.
Graz did/does build minivans and the older Grand Cherokee.
ETA: nope, apparently I’m wrong.
Much like the last time (Audi), user error. And occasionally fraud.
In all seriousness, it anyone here experiences that, hit the “off” button and hold it for down for 3+ seconds. That 3 seconds will undoubtedly seem like an eternity. (this is for the keyless cars)
For all other cars: put it in neutral.
Or, you know, take your foot off the “brakes” and put it on the peddle directly to the left of the “brakes”. In almost all cases that will take the scary speed away.
Ha. You think most people over here have a clutch pedal in their cars?
The joke is that almost all people who experience an unintended acceleration (UA) are in fact pushing on the gas peddle, although they will claim to know which peddle they were pressing. And as you might expect, if one removes their foot from the gas peddle, and places it on another peddle, further to the left, they might hit the brake peddle. It is unlikely for a driver to select wrongly twice, even considering the low quality expected of a driver who muddles up the peddles. However, should the driver again miss the brake peddle while going too far to the left, s/he may only turn on the high-beams; this might not seem like an improvement over the UA case, but should the driver turn on the headlights (really, really hard), it gives the rest of us a warning to avoid the Toyota, being driven by an old person, with the high-beams on, at a high rate of speed. Unfortunately, most drivers who experience an UA event survive, and do not appreciate being made to look foolish by means of his/her high beams; as a result, car-makers no longer fit floor mounted high beam switches. I do not consider here the possibility that the driver may engage the park brake: even a Toyota driver is not that stupid; on the other hand, the driver of a Korean min-van . . . In conclusion, the joke that I was making derived its humour from the incongruity between the peddle being pressed and the peddle that should be pressed in order to achieve the stated goal of the driver.
In next week’s column I discuss the amusement I receive when explaining jokes in an unnecessarily long winded, verbose, and supercilious manner.
I hope you’ll also be apologizing for constantly misspelling pedal.
When I was visiting Hungary, I couldn’t help but notice how many taxi cabs in Budapest were Mercedes Benzes. I still have my dad’s old SL-380, but I’m not convinced it’s any more badass than say, a domestic convertible of the same year.
Basically, I look at M-B like Stella Artois; the O-K import that got high class in the trip across the Atlantic.
Interesting side note, the driver who was taking us to the little village where my mum’s family was from told us how everyone in Hungary hates American cars. The poor people drive Skodas and Ladas, and the rest, they all drive German cars like Mercedes, BMW, and FORD. I spent about a good 20 minutes, in a pre-internet phone era, trying to convince him that Ford was not a German car maker. Good God was that frustrating. 
up until, like, now, Ford of Europe and Ford of North America might as well have been two totally unrelated companies.
True, although Ford of Europe is much more British than German - that’s where all the R & D and management types are.
Mercedes-Benz cars are high class on the other side of the pond, too. Certainly in Western Europe, at any rate. They’ve been able to do something that nobody else really can: retain cachet despite building as many commercial vehicles as they do cars.
I have the opposite experience. All of our design comes out of Cologne, and every management type (in manufacturing) is there, and not in England.