One of the things that seriously hurts MB rating with JD power is the maintenace requirements.

Japanese cars these days have maintenance schedules that consist mostly of oil changes at 7500 miles, nothing else. Brake pads last forever, no suggested tranny fluid changes, etc.

MB still uses fairly short life brake pads and rotors, and up til recently scheduled tranny fluid changes, and a lot of other stuff at fixed intervals. Everyone SHOULD do this stuff, but people percieve cars as "bettery" if all you have to do is put gas in them and change to oil once a decade.

I'll keep my "high maintenace" car, thank you.

This is percieved, alas, but many people as a lack of quality.

Add that to the fact that many, many people don't keep their cars much longer than the initial warrenty period (ie they are leased), and new ower surveys will be very heavily biased toward cars that don't require any service at all during the lease.

Benz DOES have some severe quality control problems, so do BMW and Volvo. The new Volvos are NOT the 740s!

Diamler USED to be a company that was fairly conservative about what the actually sold, but did quite a bit of engineering and research before they built something. Limited production prior to the 1980's helped -- they couldn't afford to make many running changes and couldn't afford to alienate customers. Now they have a reputation, sell comparitively huge numbers of cars, and have forgotten their conservative roots.

I prefered the old days.

Peter

__________________
1972 220D ?? miles
1988 300E 200,012
1987 300D Turbo killed 9/25/07, 275,000 miles
1985 Volvo 740 GLE Turobodiesel 218,000
1972 280 SE 4.5 165, 000 - It runs!