German cars among least reliable for engines | Motoring Issues - Car News Jan 2013

Italian cars are exciting. Japanese cars are boring. German cars are reliable.

Motorists have been making grandiose statements like these for aeons. All you need to do is log onto one of the interweb's many motoring forums to read how "all French cars are rubbish" and how "all Italian cars fall to bits the moment you leave the showroom."

But while this casual xenophobia is widespread, it isn't necessarily accurate.

A new survey from Warranty Direct has found that German cars are some of the least reliable cars on the road, with BMW, Audi and Volkswagen all coming in for criticism.

Warranty Direct studied data from 50,000 real consumer policies and found that Audi's engine failure rate was higher than any other existing manufacturer, with 1 in 27 Audi engines failing in the last year. The only manufacturer with a poorer record is the now defunct MG Rover Group, with 1 in 13 cars succumbing to engine failure over the last twelve months.

BMW also fared badly, with a failure rate of 1 in 45, while its MINI subsidiary did even worse with 1 in 40 of its engines going for a Burton. VW also made it into the list of top ten least reliable manufacturers with an engine failure rate of 1 in 52.

Flying the flag for the Germans at the other end of the table was Mercedes-Benz, with a failure rate of just 1 in 119. Honda was shown to be the most reliable manufacturer, followed by Toyota, Mercedes, Volvo, Jaguar, Lexus, Fiat, Ford, Nissan and Land Rover.

So, the next time you're in an Audi garage and the dealer tries to spin you some cobblers about precision German engineering, run away.

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by James Barrell