Quote Originally Posted by Lagonda
I find it really weird that Americans perceive VW's as being unreliable. They are one of the more reliable marques in the world. Compared to about every American marque that always gets the most negative reliability points here in Europe.
It's not perception. We had experience, a 2000 New Beetle 1.8t and a 2000 Passat GLS 4-Motion wagon. The Beetle especially ALWAYS had something wrong with it, the guys at the service place even said that they had been seeing a lot of them lately. In 4 years, 3 vacuum lines mysteriously 'disintegrated', the power windows broke once, the power window switches broke 3 times, the sunroof broke once, the taillights went bonkers twice, and all manner of plastic trim pieces kept dreaking off. My Ma loved the car and would have bought it off the lease were it not for all the crap that kept breaking.

The Passat was much better, but no more so than average. The power windows had to be fixed once, the 4-Motion (Quattro) system had some sort of computer glitch once, and the ignition module crapped out once.

Our Sienna minivan isn't shaping up to be any better either, with under 5k miles on it so far. Call me cynical, but based on my experience with new cars...is it any wonder I have no love for them?