I Ranked All European Car Brands from Worst to Best

Today, by popular demand, I am going to talk about the

best

to the

worst

European cars and since I am here in Texas, in the good times of America, I am talking about European cars that you can buy in the United States and normal cars. I'm not talking about exotic cars like Ferraris and other cars that anyone can buy, of course, Porsches are a bit high end, but that's as far as I'll go now, when I was a young mechanic in the 60s, the Europeans made some good cars Mercedes are known for their quality, things are changing so I'm talking right now about 2020, from the

worst

to the

best

of the European cars that now occupy the number seven spot, which is the last of my list, the worst European car you can buy, no. surprise fiat now i'm not talking about chrysler i'm still talking about fiat decades ago fiat abandoned the united states due to poor sales cars cramps no one could fix them right but then when they bought chrysler and became fiat chrysler they actually started selling fiat again in the United States, if you remember, a few years ago, they had all these ads about Fiat 500s coming out of the ocean and landing in the United States and one year they sold 50-something Fiat 500s, but they even retired them. they took them out of the US market now the fiat 500 because they only sold 1500 or so last year they sold the second quarter of this year 2020 they only sold 1300 of each fiat brand sold in the US so it wouldn't be a surprise You, that Fiat is going to pull their stupid Fiat brand out of the United States.

Yes, they were horrible cars back when I was a young mechanic. They came back with equally horrible cars that were not fit for the US market. I mean, there was a certain amount. from people who thought all those fiat 500's were cute little cars yada yada not so cute when you buy one for your daughter to go to college and like one of my clients did and on the 500 mile ride to school the engine blows up , not quality and of course it didn't help that these Italian cars are not known for their quality, the 500 here in the United States are all made in Mexico, a place even known for its lower quality.

Two lows are not high in my business, it certainly isn't. In the car business, to give you an example, last quarter Fiat sold 581 of those Fiats across the United States, another massive failure, so if you only hear one thing, what I'm saying in this video is don't buy a Fiat. in the united states now number six on my list is also an italian car what a surprise alfa romeo are now also owned by fiat chrysler these days but they are selling them as their own brand in the united states alfa romeo alfa romeo pulled out of the united states in the 1990s due to low sales just like fiat withdrew from the united states alfa sold less than 5,000 cars a year in the united states pulled the plug and said goodbye to america but then when fiat but chrysler they brought the alfa back to the states now in 2019 they sold like 23,000 in the states it was practically a record for alfa but of course now sales are dropping again just like the fiat 500 hey at one point they sold 50 something thousand in the United States then they sold less than 2000 when people realized what a load of garbage they were and no one started buying them anymore, stupid, want, shame, fool me twice, shame, they're going to learn like the fiat 500.

I I would. You won't be surprised at all if Alpha pulls out of the United States, they're always trying to push that image of Italian sports cars and all that, yeah, and they have a great image, beautiful cars, they go fast, they're a lot of fun to drive. but unfortunately you can't drive them for long until something breaks on them. Now I have to give high marks to the Italian automakers for consistency. In the past, they make shitty cars. They still make shitty cars now. In some places they like Fiats. 500s with diesel engines and standard transmissions are popular in Europe, where gasoline costs a lot.

They like small cars that they can park in Rome and London in small places where they fit and they don't put much mileage on their cars either. And of course, Face it, they're not giving away alphas, one of their Spider sports cars starts at about 68k, take a Mazda Miata, it starts at about 26k and the Miata will run forever, it almost never breaks down. The Japanese killed the Italians in the United States. when they started coming out with smaller quality cars, yes the Americans say we were never good at building small cars, that's just the way it is, but the Japanese ate the Italians, now number five on my list from best to worst is mini, now you.

You might think, oh, the cute English minis realize that BMW owns that they're actually a German company and they're certainly better made than the Italian cars, but and this is a giant bullet, they cut a lot of corners when they build these things . I see them where they are. You're five and six years old, the wiring harness and parts start to melt because they use two cheap wires, and of course being a BMW, the people who work on them have to have high-end computers. I have them because I'm a professional and I get all that stuff for free from companies, now they want me to show them their tools and I don't charge anything, I just say send them to me and I'll test them if they're good and use them in my videos.

Repairs are very expensive and since BMW makes them, not only are the labor and computers that analyze them expensive endeavors, the parts are outrageously expensive when I told the customer that he had worn the brakes on the rear so much that he had have to replace them. the calipers and rotors and he found out it was going to cost about $700 in parts. They got those same parts for a Toyota at Autozone with really nice remanufactured parts for probably 95. They are just super expensive and they don't. Wait great, they are building a little better than before but their engines always blew up, had catalytic converter issues and broke down and they should have fixed them under warranty for some of my customers but of course being a BMW dealer that is working in them they are not going to give away anything for free sometimes I had to call them personally and tell them look, you know the iron, I'm Scottie, that's a great catalytic converter, federal law, you have to replace it because it's less than seven years old, finally some of them they did but when you have to argue with them about something they should fix automatically and that will only tell you the game you are playing many will take you for a long trip just see how much money we can get out of this guy's pocket that's just the name of the game with luxury cars and although it is a mini and has nothing to do with luxury cars, you are going to pay for BMW. prices for repairs but they are so cute well that's how they sell them the women love them they are so cute they are like those new Volkswagen beetles especially the convertible tops look like a baby stroller and the women love them look what happened to the beatles now they have gone gone because they made them like shit realize that the modern mini basically has nothing to do with the old mini that had those little tiny wheels simple standard transmission didn't cost much the first minis revolutionized cars in England before after the Second World War a lot of people drove motorcycles with sidecars and when they came with a small cheap car that was reliable enough the English flocked and sold millions of them but the modern mini is like the new beetle.

It had very little to do with the old beetle and the modern mini is a heavy overweight car, they don't have as much acceleration, they basically weigh too much and they are never going to be cars that fast and with all that weight even though they are small things that are They wear out faster if you value your money. My advice is to stay away from the minis. They are not that expensive if you go for a low end one but they are not very well built either and with BMW and parts and labor being very expensive when they break and cost a fortune to fix now number four on the list is volkswagen , should I say volkswagen porsche audi volkswagen owns them all, does everyone know that if they look at me?

I'm not a Volkswagen fan. but I must say they are better made than the minis, sure Volkswagen sells a lot of cars a few years ago they outsold Toyota and now they were number one, but Toyota makes cars for what they feel the market wants. They'll make faster ones for the American market, they'll make slower ones with diesel engines and standard transmissions to get fantastic gasoline mods for the European market, and yes, not the most trusted executives who got caught up in that diesel emissions cheating scandal and then they pretended they fixed it and then some guy in California found out that they actually didn't fix it and showed it to them so they had to catch him a second time and they're paying all kinds of fines and some of the guys in Germany I guess .

They are going to go to jail in Germany, but none of them are coming back to the United States to be tried, so they are not going to go to jail in the United States, where they caused most of the damage and the strange thing was that these diesel engines worked very well. just that they tried to make them get better gas mileage and more horsepower by polluting more, if they had followed the rules it wouldn't have been bad at all and US diesel engines aren't a big deal anyway, but come on normal Americans who drive a gasoline automatic transmission, yes they are better than the minis, but still Volkswagen had nothing but problems with those dual clutch transmissions they put in Volkswagens many times, it costs you between five and seven thousand dollars to rebuild one. of their horrible transmissions when it breaks usually the car is no longer worth it so it's not worth fixing but when I see what volkswagen is volkswagen porsche audi they went the wrong way with a lot of things they took a lot of the Porsche technology Audi and put it in Volkswagens, so they took a simple car and made it complex so that it was no longer cheap to fix and very reliable and then they took the cheapest Volkswagen technology and put it in a portion of Audi and they are not so well made like they used to be decades ago, it's a lose lose situation and if you look at their other subsidiaries, Porsche and Audi, I mean those things are real endless money pits as they get older, even when I was young.

Mechanic, I looked at it when I was working and said why would someone have such a ridiculous design where you have to take the engine mount off and lift it up here just to change the fan belt? And that's when cars were simpler now half the stuff you have to take apart at those audi dealerships they even say, well we have all this undercarriage at the bottom of the front of the car for efficiency, when you shift the oil you don't remove the drain plug, that's too much work just stick a tube on a dipstick and suck it up and that's what they do with the distributors.

We all know there's going to be some sludge left on the bottom, that's why the drain plugs on the bottom so you can remove it and the garbage comes out, you suck it up from the top, some of it will stay in, but I wonder if they care, at all Anyway they don't want the engines to last forever, some of them don't have dipsticks for the engine oil anymore, I mean. the germans get carried away with themselves now number three on the list the worst the best is mercedes-benz the quality they definitely still hire a volkswagen they used to be cool cars but like the rest of the germans they throw in super tech whenever they can some of these modern mercedes will have something like 80 microprocessors in a car to work on them.

You need a star Mercedes tester that costs a fortune. You're going to pay guys tons to work on cars. The parts, especially in the United States, are outrageously high and the quality is not like it used to be, to give you an example, running down the street, he bought a new Mercedes S class for 112 when he was 10 years old, you know what he got for that car, 3,800 dollars and it still ran, I mean, it had problems because it's a Mercedes, but that shows that the quality is no longer there. If you think you can buy a Mercedes Benz in the United States and drive five hundred thousand miles like you used to in the '60s, you're living in dreamland.

Now they still make excellent engines. I'll grant you that the Germans were always good at making engines, especially Mercedes, but in general the problem with the car is the price you pay for what you get. You know it's much better to buy a Lexus. It will last three four five hundred thousand miles, you will have very few repairs, whereas with the Mercedes you will pay a fortune keeping it now when it breaks and they break quite a bit with all these computers with very high plastic parts. technological things that cost a fortune when it breaks and then the car has to be reprogrammed when you change the part because the Germans are insidious about that and they just do crazy things like in some Mercedes that had theoil dipstick so you can I don't break the oil with a dipstick yeah they have a stupid computer sensor but those break too and then oh wow it didn't tell me I was out of oil so my engine exploded.

I see that so many times, I guess Mercedes feels that way. Well you have your Mercedes now it is burning oil I don't care if the engine blows up because that means it's time to buy another Mercedes that one is worn out I mean they didn't used to be like that but they are today and even now. what worries me is that mercedes lives off its name and image by selling cars and number two on my list is bmw, now bmw the ultimate driving machine, they always make great engines, there is no doubt that the transmissions are getting better every time. again because many get them from ZF, which is another German company that makes very good transmissions.

For example, the ZF company sold over 3 million of their high-power 8-speed ZF8 HP transmission to all kinds of manufacturers in the world, so they have some good things going for them, but of course here in the America is a luxury car, they always rip off their customers, that's how they work. Cars are extremely expensive, expensive to maintain, super expensive to repair, guys who rip off their customers. I remember a few years ago he was working on a BMW, he wanted me to change the transmission fluid. The only people who had this really strange fluid that worked was a BMW dealer, so I went to them and told them I wanted to buy some fluid. from you and I said, well, we're sorry, we can't sell you, uh, quarts of liquid, I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, we buy them in big 55-gallon drums or whatever, the big ones, true, and we charge our customers for the service we don't charge per liter because if we did we would have to get a scale or legal volume to measure it, so it is exact, so we just charge that service fee of so much for the fluid that They just guessed, they said right. if it was four quarters then we would see how much we would charge the court and give them a flat rate but they couldn't charge them in court because then they would have to have all these legal actions that they didn't want to get involved in so they told me we can't sell your quartz .

Great, so what can you sell me? Well, I said we can't actually sell you anything, but if you want to contact the manufacturer, you can buy. These 55 gallon drums, right, and they said, you know, eight nine hundred dollars a drum or something like that, so I told the customer you want to switch, go to the dealer, they're going to rip you off, but it's a scam company anyway and that is. just the tip of the bucket when it comes to BMWs, you have tons of microprocessors and probably the worst use of plastic of any German manufacturer in BMWs I have seen when they are seven, eight and nine years old, all the plastics crack, all the things cost a fortune, you have to spend thousands of dollars and generally customers just get rid of the car, so now they are fun to drive, especially their m series, their racing series, solid build, as far as I'm concerned, Better built than a Mercedes M. series, if you have the money and don't care about the money, go ahead and buy a BMW, just realize that other than the M series, the resale value of the BMW is absolute garbage because everyone knows it cost a fortune, so you can get used to it once it's cheap.

Don't be fooled into buying a used one that has 140,000 miles on it because chances are it's on its last legs and you'll end up investing a lot of money in it. I mean, if you like it, you'll want to buy one and the mechanic. He says it's okay now and you can get it for, you know, a couple grand or something, go ahead and buy yourself a toy, but don't expect to drive it every day, put 15,000 miles a year or more on it because it'll fall apart. In front of your eyes, in the short term, I have to say that my clients bought European cars, BMW owners are quite satisfied until they get old and start to fall apart, and many of those people are doctors, lawyers, it doesn't mean much. for them they make a lot of money and if they get five six years out of the car and they don't have any problems, they are happy with the car, so you have that kind of money, you want a BMW, go ahead, you have money to spend.

Anyway, now the last car on my list of worst to best European cars is Volvo. Technically, Volvo is not a European company but a Chinese owner, but they still build a lot of cars in Europe. They build a lot of cars in China now. You know that they are moving production and, being a Chinese company, they really like hybrid and electric cars, they claim that in the future that is all they are going to manufacture, they are hybrid and electric cars that they no longer manufacture with gasoline. Diesel cars or cars are adopting a different mentality.

Volvos were fantastic cars when I was a young mechanic in the 60's. I had an aunt who had half a million miles on her 1800's which was a great little sports car with standard dual basic transmission. Stromberg carburetors, I mean, it was a simple car that was built and could last. A retired Long Island schoolteacher put more than 3 million miles on ed Volvos. They were solidly built cars back in the day. They still make good cars, not even close. As solid as that because they started mass production a little bit later and then when they went to front wheel drive they had some issues with some of the front wheel drive transmissions and things they've fixed a lot of those things but even up to the Today I have clients with Volvos and if you don't mind the high original price, they are pretty well built cars, as I say, the Chinese own them, now they are going to hybrid and electric cars, we will see what the future is. brings with it, but they still made solid, pretty reliable cars and of course Volvo was the first real company in the world to go crazy with safety so they put airbags and all kinds of stuff and gave away the technology on everything the world for people to mark. us in cars, you know them very kindly and they were solidly built cars, now a lot of people didn't like them because they looked boxy, they are much more elegant than they used to be, but the Swedes always made solid and reliable engines and once they discovered how to make automatic transmissions with front wheel drive.

Those are good. The old ones with rear wheel drive had almost no problems, but no, the modern ones have better transmissions. I mean I worked on one the other day it had an ace and it had a Toyota automatic transmission so if you can't beat them join them on that one and unlike a lot of other European cars I've had a lot of customers buy Volvos used and kept them for years, unfortunately for Volvo, they are European car and still have a bad image in the states for money, so I have had many customers who bought used Volvos with maybe a hundred thousand miles and paid two and three grand for them and drove them another hundred thousand miles and barely spend money outside my law, you can take advantage of that with a volvo if you want a European car, of course you would want a mechanic like me to look at this, I can't trust anyone with a used car, but that's one. one of the few European cars and I tell people that if the check is good you might get a used one and you can get a good deal, and with the Chinese taking over and talking about hybrid and electric cars, who knows, they might end up making great electric cars and Great hybrid cars, everyone knows that a lot of productions go to China anyway and then they will start selling them all over the world just like the Japanese originally did.

They started for their small market and began to expand by building better products that cost less. that people wanted to drive, so now you know a little more about European cars, so if you have money burning holes in your pockets and you just have to have a European car, at least now you can make a logical decision about it, so yes You won't want to miss another one of my new car repair videos. Remember to ring the bell.