There is a bit of nostaligia in thinking about the way mb used to build cars, but as the great mangement guru Peter F. Drucker has pointed out, manufacturing businesses for the last thrity years have been in steady decline, and hence business like mercedes have had to respond to a global economy by uniting with other big manufacturing firms and streamlining their production to follow manufacturing along product and service lines; heres a link to a typical (if unrelated) article by this 90 year old thinker

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99oct/9910drucker.htm

the issue of where and how the product is built or of how durable it is would become irrelevant if the company offered a lifetime warranty on the car. If an mb had a bullet-proof warranty that lasted 20 years or something, the definintion of its durability would no longer be expressed in terms of its mechanical longevity, but on the strength warranty service. imagine the convenience of a waranty that covered everything but oil and tires for 20 years, and offered free tows to the service center.

Again, mb (ie., db) must either build the cars to lst long or build the warranty to last long, and given the nature of parting out production world wide, they may have no chjoice but to build the most durable warranty in the industry.