Many of you keep complaining about high maintance cost of vehicles specially german cars like VW/Audi, BMW, MB and that they always break down, parts are expensive hard to find someone that would work on them. Also many of you want all these cool luxury features that cars should have, like power & heated/cooled seats, navigation, laser guided cruise control, DVD player in headrests, 4zone climate control, lane change assist feature, power door locks, windows, mirror, for summer we need sunroof. For engine must have lot of power and awesome fuel economy and operate quite, oh and very low emissions, must have ABS, ESP, ASR, EDL ( for poor weather driving conditions), having air or hydroulic suspension would be nice too with normal, sport and comfort or off road settings, and many more features that available this days on cars and last is to have vehicle that is trouble free and cheap to repair/service. I know many of you will say I don't care about these cool features, but come be honest how many of you when bought your TDI or other vehicle wanted to have some of above or all of listed features for comfortable driving experiance?
Reality is that you can't have all in one package, if you want long lasting reliable cheap to operate vehicle then you will have to get rid of all those fancy features. Keep very minimum of powered features maybe have like CD player, PW/PL and cruise control, have manual transmission and cheap low maintance engine that is easy to fix and uses cheap parts.
I personally don't know anyone yet that owned a german vehicle then traded in for Asian or Domestic vehicle and doesn't miss their old VW/Audi or BMW, MB car. They all complained about how expensive it was to own operate it, but none of them said that they hated it because it was boring, uncomfortable, unsafe to drive. There is very simple rule that applies to everything, "You want to play, you got pay".
For last, each of you look and think of How many of you, your close ones or friends would have been out of jobs if all cars or other equipment out there would been bullet proof reliable and never broke down, only needed simple maintance things like filters, fluids? Or try to think and put toghter a picture of how many people do you employ or give job to when you buy as simple as oil filter to your car? Here is rough picture, we raw parts supplier, then have manufactor, shipping company, wholesaler, retail store then you as customer. So your $10 oil filter keeps many people on job by the time you receive it from manufacture to you, then we have repair/service shops with mechanics that you pay to install that filter.