I would have to disagree, were are they imported from south America or Europe? the components are very solid. Generally as they age the problems are to do with plastics, have you ever had to change a radiator on one? Pain in the rear lol.
They retain their value very well bit like bmws.
back in the late 90';s, i had a rash of audis/vw's with water pumps going bad with only 40-50k on them. found out it was the plastic impeller on the knurled shaft that was letting loose. whos genius idea was that?
used to get a ton of them with bad thermostats in the same mileage. i've done a ton of catalytic converters in the a6/passats. sometimes the cat itself, more often that little section of flex pipe would break. can't buy that flex section, but rather only the entire cat assembly for that side.
timing belt? sheesh....gotta take the whole nose off of the car. almost prohibitively expensive to do it preventative. then when it breaks, you gotta pull the head too.
i just can't let myself recommend cars like that to anyone i know or even remotely like.
saabs may have improved over the years, but my experiences with those wrecks in the 80's/90's has jaded me against them pretty heavily.
maybe audi/vw ships the "bottom of the barrel" cars over here to us, i dunno.......
