Cars only show if they're well made after like a decade? These are not washing machines or something.
Sadly that's also why it's hard to buy a new car, you only know what's a quality car years down the line.
First impression matters though.
Sadly that's also why it's hard to buy a new car, you only know what's a quality car years down the line.
First impression matters though.
I have a friend who's a big Honda fan, amateur racer, a true "petrolhead" but with an intact brain. Runs his own shop. Naturally there was a barrage of jokes when I rolled up in my new Chinese EV, but then we put it up on a lift and there wasn't really much to joke about. The platform looks boring and mature. Things are where you'd expect them, they're the right size and shape, you can tell why they're there.
Obviously, the motor/reducer bearings in my car may fail in a few years (like in the Kona Electric or Škoda Enyaq) or the charging circuitry may fail (like the ICCU in the Ioniq 5) but then we're already comparing it against legacy manufacturers, and that's a pretty good position to be in.
European cars are incredibly expensive these days and have been for a while compared to imports.
About 7 years ago I was looking for a new car and had only owned and drove VW cars. Naturally, I looked at VW, the Golf in particular. With all the bells and whistles, it came to about 35k EUR. A Civic was about 11K cheaper. Guess what I bought?
There was nothing in the Golf that could justify the extra cost. Nowadays is the same.
I mean, seriously. I can buy a shitty Argentine-made base model used 5-year-old VW Amarok with 70K km on it for the same price as a brand new Chinese-made Changan Hunter (whether gas or REEV). The second one is also going to be far, far cheaper to fuel (if you choose the REEV), maintain and repair.
Let's not even talk EVs. Europeans exited the market before it even began. European brands only start to show up at around what, the 70-100K dollar bracket? Sure, the Porsche Taycan is cool and all, but I've never seen one. Meanwhile, BYDs, Deepals, MGs, and a million other random brands are only growing more and more common with each passing day.
The ID.3 starts at like 35k USD here in Europe. Škoda Elroq and Enyaq, both under 50k USD.
Not always. Sometimes the components are a lot older than the car and have earned a bit of a reputation. The powerplant in my car is like 20 years older than the model year. The underlying platform is nearly as old as well. All proven to be boringly reliable.
I guess this changes in the EV era with faster rate of iterations compared to the ICE era. More lessons still to learn with the EV cars I'm sure. Meanwhile a 4 cyl compact car is practically a commodity and aside from safety widgets like backup cameras, have been relatively unchanged for 15 or 20 years.
There are a lot of low price bracket Chinese imports (MGs mainly) that seem to have severe rust issues that are present at delivery.
And Toyotas a few years ago had a problem where certain colour cars would have their paint fall off in huge sheets as the primer was incorrect or something.
I do agree in principle that most modern cars should be pretty good for their warranty period/first owner, but I've also seen some egregious edge cases!
Unless you have a wet belt in your Puretech engine that will blow up in 5-8 years...
Mechanics and enthusiasts around here (Spain) call this engines "pudretech" (rot-tech)...
I had AEG Lavamat 1055 about 35 years (from 1982), worked well without hitch. It was quite small, top loading model etc. Fast spin-dry w/ variomatic (shaking also while spinning). Laundry out of it was quite dry already.
Then 2017 building plumbing had to be redone and gave reason to remake bathroom completely and replacing old equipment. I would have bought Miele model but it didn't fit reserved place and I ended up buying Electrolux instead.
That's now month short of 9 years and I have no reason to believe it will not work well at least another 10 years to come. regardless advertised 10 years warranty.
This current one has more electronic parts, but now searching by its model found only fault codes all seem to be user errors, overfilling, water hose not open, draining filter clogged etc. All non issues whoever bothers knowing how to maintain and operate that thing over years. No complaints about issues with electronics problems.
These were first used by a couple and later single (me) needs which are usually once a week plus twice a month washing 4-5 uses single day. Which becomes bit over 100 washing in year.
That's just 1000 washings in 10 years and 3500 in 35 years. For a family washing every day once it would be 3563 uses in 10 years.
If washing machine isn't badly kept against instructions and it isn't cheapest knock off plastic rubish, why would be a surprise if it doesn't last at least that 10 years use washing family laundry. And last many decades with single or dink use?
After they finally engaged with the warranty, they had someone come out to 'fix' it once every couple weeks until I gave up and just bought a different brand washer/dryer.
I'm now sworn off Beko, and will happily tell everyone I can about my terrible service :)
And there are still parts too
All parts still available and when I bought new hose few years ago from service I asked if they still are willing to fix it if it went broke answer was. Sure absolutely, just bring it here and we make it work again. I've just bought once new floor nozzle that was worn out and that hose because it grew leaky from ends. Third party dust bags are available and very cheap.
It would be nice if the EU or someone introduced an energy star type system for reliability and repairability so that consumers could have some kind of idea what the quality is likely to be.
Maybe it’s me then. We just don’t get that long out of them. We have tried Fisher and Paykel and Samsung. Never had more than and year warranty either.
They do run at least once a day often more, but that’s not enough to explain it.
Gosh, but there are other ways to solve that issue like having bit more of fav clothes, so that you dont' have to wash same cloth every day but instead was a bunch of them end of week. Need white shirt every day at work, buy at least 10 of them, use one each day, wash & iron weekend, put on pile1 and use from pile2 next week rotating for even use and to have some redundancy, then pile1 week and so on. Get more trousers etc. whatever you need. This is what I did when had job where dress code told what to wear in office.
And kids, buy them more fav clothes too if it otherwise becomes fight what they want to wear daily.
But each to their own. Above is just my view and how I learned when I was kid looking my parents, and how I've done also.
They get permanently smelly if not washed promptly.
This would probably last a couple I expect