[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by Genevagear

Efthreeoh, thank you for detailing your experience. Do you feel those late 80's BMWs were designed better or worse than the current BMW's? (more finicky electronics for sure)

The_phew, I agree with you in many ways. Acura and Honda are making fewer American market vehicles in Japan. That might explain the drop in quality, but I can't say for sure. I believe it is best to keep the design and engineering in the same plant, or country, as the manufacturing. Cars designed in the home country and built in an another, using local/regional parts, always seem to have long-term quality and reliability issues. I would not buy an Acura/Honda built not built in Japan, or a BMW not built in Germany.

Interesting comment. Generally cars are assembled using the world-wide automotive supply chain resource regardless of the country the cars are assembled in. There are some local sourcing of parts from US suppliers, but those suppliers also supply parts for other out-of-country assembly plants. An observation I have is BMW's pant in South Carolina. We own a 1997 Z3 1.9L and a 2008 Z4 3.0si Coupe. Both were built at Spartanburg. The Z3 was built October 1996 and the Z4 built May 2008 (ironically the last three digits of each cars VIN are the same). The assembly quality of the Z4 is far superior than the Z3. The Z3 interior was really at fault for the build quality, but all E36's of that era were known for poor interior build quality regardless of country of final assembly. The Z4 Coupe is of as good build quality as my '06 E90 built at Regensburg in April 2006.