They mostly offer those long warranties because they severely damaged their brands with the quality of the products they rolled out initially. So now they have to give huge warranties to offset the meme that Hyundai and Kia will not survive even a few years out of warranty without major work.

It apparently is a viable path for a company to enter the auto market though, as I think they've transitioned well over the last couple decades into respectable auto-makers with standard quality. That probably makes them a good purchase since you can still get those warranties for the time being. Honestly, I thought they would be phasing them out a decade ago.

I think the brands that did this best are Audi and Skoda, they went from pariah status to nearly best in their class. Both were classic examples of turnaround management by VW.

... and back to pariah.

Not judging by the sales numbers:

https://www.motor1.com/news/238839/vw-sales-record-q1-2018/

No, not really. More popular than ever if anything.

I was not aware that Audi had pariah status..?

Before the VW take-over they had what was probably the worst rust issues in the industry with the exception of Fiat.

Unintended acceleration…

Hyundai and Kia and now starting to challenge even the German car manufacturers with their i30N and Stinger cars.

In fact, they specifically poached a number of former executives from BMW's M division to lead those projects.

But I thought we were talking about different things. Mainly the value of the car after 8-10 years, long after any warranty expires. Low priced cars don't have much resale value after a decade because they had lower value as new. And that's a lot of money saved with the initial purchase.

But when it comes to warranty you should take care, people imagine this is like the warranty on their phone. It's not, basically it says the body won't rust. The rest is covered by dozens of other clauses that more or less just guarantee than almost nothing gets replaced under warranty.