I hear you with those German vehicles and their maintenance costs.
I spent a good amount of time in Germany when I was active Army, and I bought a nice new BMW 3 series in 2004 in Germany.
It felt like buying a Ford in the US...both in price and maintaining it while in Germany.
But when I brought it back to the states, holy crap, oil changes, tire replacement, basic maintenance, etc... went from reasonable to stupid really quick in terms of price.
I love BMWs, but I wont own another one in the States because of this regardless of how good the deal is.
Yep, exactly right.
Even some of the “human factors engineering” (i.e., user interface) on the ten year old Mercedes are exceedingly stupid. To change the brightness of the dash lights you have to use the arrows and “enter” button on the steering wheel to navigate about five layers deep in the commands. Then you have four or five fixed brightness levels. My wife likes bright dash lights, I like them dim. So we are BOTH constantly having to remember the awful, arcane menu structure to change the lights. Of course, you have to take your eyes off the road to hit the very tiny arrow buttons on the steering wheel.
In the old days, you grabbed the push/pull light switch and rotated it. You could do it by touch and change the dash brightness in 0.1 seconds without ever taking your eyes off the road. Today it takes 30 seconds to figure it out with eyes off the road.
Don’t get me started on the Mercedes fan speed for the cabin air. It’s another very tiny black button with a faint white speed icon buried down low on the dash by the console. I can NEVER find it and you cannot see it because it is black on a dark part of the dashboard.
I swear these car makers never, ever think about ease-of-use.
The Three Mile Island nuclear accident decades ago was eventually attributed mainly to poor human factors engineering. The operators were confused by the signals, the panel layout, and the location of controls. Seems like the people that designed those control systems all went to the auto-makers.