Every single BMW and Merc here has an oil spot under them. Not a single Toyota or Honda do. I see the BMW and Merc drivers often in dealer loaners for some reason. I don't see what is so amazing about them, they don't have any performance gains over the competition, their interiors are German garbage minimalism with a dash of lacking any aesthetics and so forth. I mean, if the German garbage aesthetics were exchanged for pragmatic reasons I would understand but nothing is even pragmatic about the interior design. I have seen the quotes for just regular maintenance on those things and holy shit, they aren't even in the ballpark of reasonable compared to what the local Korean that just started his shop and is hungry for customers can do (literally 1/4 of the price). Just to give you an example, for break changes BMW replaces not just the pads but the fucking rotors! They won't even consider sending the rotors out to be ground to get their quotes down and OF COURSE all the parts they sell you are BMW brand parts which are way more expensive than they should be in comparison to off brand parts that are rated just as high quality. I don't drive any of the above and I don't fanboy over any particular brand. All the north american stuff is trash as is the rest of the industry. However, learning about Honda and Toyota quality over the last few years by watching Scotty Kilmer has been really interesting. People who say BMW and Mercs are amazing cars don't seem to know much about cars. I get the sense that it is all about the status of driving one. This is the same thing with Teslas. Every single owner I know raves about them and every single week one tells me I should get one. I try to explain to them that recharge times are not acceptable, that the battery life is too short, that i don't want to wait 20 minutes in random bullshit charge stations just to top up so I could get home, that I cannot recharge every other block to 100% if I wanted to like with gas or diesel and they just go "but, it's got what you crave, electrolytes!". With that being said, I don't agree with Scotty Kilmers purely practical approach. I don't get what the point is of driving a reliable car if it is ugly. But, the bottom line with BMW and Mercs is that they are basically piles of garbage in virtually every metric of quality and if they built them right working class would be able to afford the operating costs.