[katana]

Your point reminded me of some business I used to do in the Middle East. My company was selling portable steam and pressure washers that were being used out in the desert on the oil rigs. The design was simple, robust, more or less idiot proof, and had been around largely unchanged for at least twenty years. Our chief competition was a German manufacturer who made machines beautifully designed so that the operator could fine tune everything specific to his purpose.

When I asked our dealer why he was succeeding so well against the cheaper and more advanced and aesthetically modern German machines (this was back in the Reagan days when the Dollar was hugely strong against the D-Mark and we were at a major cost disadvantage) he said our machines would last and do the job but when the Pakistanis and other uneducated oilfield laborers got hold of the German machines they would start playing with all the buttons and dials and ruin it in hours. And the design was so complicated that the service engineers (also Pakis and worse) were hopeless in making repairs. Rugged, reliably, and simple enough for an illiterate peasant to fix served the Russians well in WWII and as my story may illustrate Germans can find it hard to change habits.

[FreedomPoster]

They still have he same tendencies today given what I think I know about German cars. I still like German cars, but you have to have the right mindset about it, and be willing to put up with reliability quirks for the handling at speed. I see them as reliable Italian cars.