Rook: My experience with German vehicles has been that they are insanely costly to maintain compared to Japanese vehicles.The Germans always seem to do the most elegant and COMPLEX solution for any given vehicle feature. This makes the vehicles very sophisticated, which is great until they need service, at which point you discover a few things:
- The service required is beyond what you can do "at home" with normal home facilities and without special tools and special training
- The parts required are insanely costly compared to Japanese parts.
As an example, I briefly owned a Mercedes AMG C63 (475hp 6.3 liter V8 car that costs $100,000 in Canada if bought new) which I bought used for a great price, and got the dealer to throw in a service contract because of warnings from online friends about the costs of service and repairs. I never needed to use the service contract, but only because I only kept the car for a few months, as my wife hated its complexity. But while owning it, here are some of the incidents that other forum members, with and without service contracts, reported on the C63 forum:
- All pre-2012 C63s eventually blow a head gasket because the head bolts were improperly heat treated. No problem if still under warranty. $6000 problem if out of warranty (no Mercedes "goodwill" repairs)
- A normal brake job costs $5000 on that car, mostly due to overpriced parts. My salesman made a big deal out of the fact that the one I was buying had already had a recent brake job done, so I need not put aside $5000 anytime soon (before he realized that I was going to demand a free service contract). Multiple forum members encountered this surprise cost while I was a forum member. Who would even imagine that a brake job could cost $5000?
- The headlights are singing and dancing fancy units that follow the steering and also automatically adjust vertically to changes in the car's stance due to varying number of passengers. Great. Until one gets damaged or simply fails. Each headlight can only be replaced as a complete unit. Cost = $5000. No kidding. One of the forum members had to pay that when his wife accidentally hit something in the garage with the headlight taking the hit.
- ALL dealer services endure "the Mercedes AMG tax". NO service and NO part is exempt.
- Every single aftermarket part is priced knowing that Mercedes AMG customers are used to being gouged. A decent exhaust system for example was $4500.
Every single BMW motorcycle owner I have known, without exception, has commented on the extremely high ownership costs compared to Japanese bikes.
Rook, you've been warned. :)
Jim G
* Last updated by: JimGnitecki on 6/11/2019 @ 7:25 AM *