What about cars? Are Germans more likely to buy or lease a new car? Or do more people buy used cars with cash?
My grandmother taught it to me this way: credit is for necessities; for everything else you save. Also: low quality products are more expensive than high quality products in the long run (because you have to replace them more often).
So as an example, if you're in a tight spot and an expensive household appliance (or your car that you need for your job) breaks, it's okay to take out a loan or financing. But if you're already good and it's just a quality of life thing (e.g. a bigger TV when you already have a working one) you save money until you can afford it.
That said, in recent decades a lot of young people have started getting financing for things like bigger TVs or mail order products. This is generally seen as a lower-class problem and has been prominently featured on TV programmes about indebted teenagers and such (a decade earlier when TV was more relevant).
I'd say lifestyle financing is a thing these days, but it's still frowned upon by most people because it's not considered sustainable and basically a form of delayed personal bankruptcy.
(A note on "lower class": the term probably has different connotations in different cultures (and even in different parts of society); I'm specifically talking about people from a low educational background who make minimum wage in low prestige jobs or rely on social welfare.)
"Unterschicht" (=lower class) is pretty similar in meaning to "trailer-park white trash" in American English.
In the case of "formally a company car", leasing is not perceived as personal debt at all but just as a car that is much nicer than what you would buy on your own and that you happen to loose when you quit your job.
Privately held new cars are the realm of those who can easily afford to pay up front (e.g. a large fraction of those are bought by are retirees in burn those savings as long as you can mode) and those who are at the same time in the top percentiles of both madness for cars and willingness to go into debt (these people certainly do exist, just in slightly but noticeably lower numbers than elsewhere).
Oh, and a fun anecdote further illustrating the craziness of it all: there's an organization now that sued for eligibility of all kinds of vehicles, so if my employer had such a programme I could get my next fancy bicycle through them! (But as an inner city renter, my bike ownership is limited by storage anyways, and pretty much maxed out already)
On the flipside, 1% of the car's list price as well as 0.03% for every km distance between your residence and place of employment is taxed per month. So for 20km distance, it would be 1.6% of the car's list price. That is added as income onto your monthly salary for tax calculation, and those taxes then deducted from your actual cash salary.
To readers that might think otherwise: while this certainly is a powerful setup to give Tesla a hard time in the market (if you only paid personally relative to initial cost, nothing at all for consumables, would you still want to go electric?), it clearly predates them. I have personally (and legally, I was told) burnt company fuel in "daddies car" (which he did not own) back in the 90ies.