Are all German cars the same? Is there a reason they all declined together, in your opinion?
It is most obvious with things like subscription services for basic function, like acceleration or the seat heaters you already paid for, but it has been present in a more insidious way for far longer, like intentionally breaking good design so that small cheap and easy to mass manufacture parts break at predictable schedules. These are then quoted to you at $900+ for a part that will cost you 60 through china, for what is a plastic mould, some magnets and a wire. The cheap replacements work just fine and last just as long.
So, over time, we've become so fed-up with it, and it is a problem present from bmw, vw, audi and beyond, that we just started going with Toyota/Hyundai or Chinese EV's etc, and no one has a gripe since. Repairs when required are cheap and easy, often easily done at home, cars drive almost if not just as well, mileage is comparable, joy of driving is comparable, overall there is simply no value left in German cars beyond the status symbol, something we care little for.
The software is garbage, the car is too fancy (electric folding seats) but poorly implemented so it’s just frustrating. Total nanny car, can’t turn off backup beeping alerts. Rear row of seats randomly go to full hot on the climate system.
New battery is $700. Can only use a BMW battery installed by a BMW technician with computer access (they are coded and only a tech with the keys can pair the new battery to your car).
Should have just bought a damned minivan, but the wife likes it and doesn’t want to get rid of it.
The enthusiasts car company is no more.
But parts for the older ones are getting harder to come by. The Classic Center isn't what it once was. You used to be able to get almost any part for any car but many things are NLA for cars that are only 20-30 years old.
Some of the recent models have plastic timing chain guides and have turned the engine around so that the timing chains are in the back. The only innocent explanation is that the car is only meant to last 10 years at most, so saving the money on plastic instead of metal and screwing whoever owns the car when the timing chains need to be redone (or ruining the engine when the chain fails) is out of scope for their quality team.
There were many older models of BMW that had an electric water pump. If that sounds silly, well, it is. And it failed frequently and was again, very difficult to replace.
I just don't have any respect for German automotive engineering. Reliability is job #1. And the company's themselves, well, "collusive" is a pretty good term. I saw an estimate that German auto industry collusion resulted in about $10k of additional cost per vehicle to U.S. buyers. The cases have somehow been kept quiet, but they've at least been caught holding back innovations until the other automakers have a competitive response, and gaslighting regulators into allowing higher emissions from diesels in the name of reducing the size and filling frequency of the AdBlue tank. I've also heard that there's another layer of this in the parts suppliers. Explains how a wiper motor or wiper body module is somehow hundreds of dollars.
On the face of it, it's not actually a bad idea. The electric pump can run at an optimal speed regardless of engine rpm. This means the pump can be downsized, because otherwise if it's driven directly from the engine it'd have to be sized for the worst case scenario of low rpm and high load.
Same reason why many vehicles nowadays have electric radiator fans rather than driven directly from the crankshaft like in the "good ol' days". (Of course with transverse mounted engines a crankshaft driven fan doesn't really work either, so that's another big reason to go for an electric fan.)
Now, of course this concept can be badly implemented, just like any other part of the design.
Electric water pumps are a great idea though, instead of having an aux belt with tensioners and pulleys, you have on single part that can be unmounted and swapped out. Can run after the engine shuts off too to help cool it down.
They are a great idea if they are reliable, or cheap and easy to replace. The BMW unit was neither.
The timing chain thing also came with plastic parts. Mount the timing chain at the back if it's needed for other goals, but don't cheap out on a bit of metal. It really seems like planned obsolescence.