Thank you everyone for excellent posts. I will certainly not make mistakes like I have done in the past having received so much helpful and understandable advice on the forum.

If Carling did forums then certainly HJ would be it.

But are VW actaully engineered any better than Toyota and Subaru?

VW seem to have dropped clangers a few times in the past decade (oil pump drives. 3-cyl engines, electric handbrakes...).

Lexus seem to be well regarded for their quality AND the aftercare of their dealers - just wondering: Have Lexus ever had some embarrassing engineering screw-ups?

Not sure you are right. Bought my car 2009 new with 7 miles now has 116000m and I plan to keep it for another 3 years. I am planning that soon wishbones, springs and shocks may need replaced.

Depends on what you want.

Scot you've asked about driveability, and thats an easy answer for me because basically i like cars with a minimum of 6 cylinders under the bonnet and a torque converter auto box, preferably petrol but doesn't have to be.

I prefer more cylinders and bigger engines because i'm not the worlds biggest fan of turbos, i dislike the lag and the time you have to idle them after cold start and before hot shutdown...apparently thats no longer required according to others and they are perfectly at liberty to rev the back side off their own cold engines and shut them down while the turbo is still glowing red, it's just something i won't do.

If i wanted something that was a fair bet at up to your budget, i'd be quite tempted to find a Merc E Class W211, later facelifts around the 08 to 10 plate range, these are good cars, or a Merc C Class from 08 onwards, Merc lost the plot in the late 90's and didn't find it again until about 2006, so later models have, with some early but rectified hiccups, regained the quality they had before, but i would only have another Merc because i have the services of a seriously good MB indy locally, and if you're going to have a Benz it must be driven by the right not the wrong wheels, so RWD it is..:-)

No make specialist indy available i wouldn't entertain a German car of any marque, some of the makes have shown utter disregard for their customers yet amazingly still sell everything they can make, i can't understand it but then i'm hardly their target market and so long as people are willing and pay through the nose for the privelidge why should those marques up their game.

Another but entirely different choice could be trying a Subaru Forester, to me Japanese cars of the old school like these are wonderful to drive, as said by the poster above the Japanese (if not tied up with the French) and Koreans tend to be very conservative, so if it aint broke they don't fix it, that suits me fine but others think differently.

We're a broad church here.

I mention E class (and C's are equally well made) because i know a chap who runs a small fleet of them on private hire work, my MB indy looks after them, they are 220 Diesels and they usually get sold on at just over 400k miles during which time they get well serviced and give little if any trouble, no silly electric parking brakes or other faff like that.

Edited by gordonbennet on 25/06/2015 at 19:32

<< One example from a few years ago that HJ highlighted my points above way the use by European manufacturers of cheaper suspension springs which were failing much earlier than you'd expect and far earlier than the more better-designed (more expensive, but probably not that much more) Japanese/Korean versions. >>

Those who buy cars new don't need to worry about failure of suspension springs, as the car will have another owner when that happens, unless they are very unfortunate.

However, when enough stories of poor engineering build quality get around, second-hand prices will eventually suffer to a degree. I do agree that many German and perceived premium marques benefit from the 'perception' of quality throughout, where often its more to do with the quality of the finish and trim materials and amount of whiz-bang gadgets available than engineering quality behind the engine, electrics and moving parts generally.

One day the 'sheen' will come off the these 'up-market' makes unless they take action (Mercedes have appeared to have started to redress the issue) soon - its mainly the fact that (as has been said by others) many such cars are regarded as 'fashion items' and 'extensions of the owner's personality/look' that myths of expensive = reliable and German = reliable have prevailed.