>a brand you buy when you can afford to have a car in the shop most of the time

TBF, unless you are in a Niche market (off roading a land rover) - it's generally hard to buy a bad car today.

Is a Camry more reliable than a 3 series? Yes. But you're talking 4 9s vs 5 under warranty; being near a good dealership with good service is markedly more important than brand reputation. If my Audi/BMW/Volvo are in the shop for a week every other year and they easily give a loaner to cover, does it really matter? At that point, the cup holder being 5% better placed for convenient access matters more.

Once you’re out of warranty BMW tend to “implode” like everything breaks at once. But even in warranty dealing with going to the dealership and getting the repair is a huge hassle vs just having a car that stays out of your way.

Time is our most valuable asset and giving it up to stupid things like waiting in dealership waiting rooms, regardless of how much free coffee and popcorn they have just isn’t my idea of time well spent.

We had a first-year X1. Starter went after ~10,000 miles. Dealership was garbage (hence my comments above), but still towed us home and dropped off a loaner-car for the ~week it took to fix. Annoying, wasted ~hour waiting for toe truck to pick us up; but overall not a horrendous experience (despite piling 3 adults and 2 dogs into toe truck).

I had a 2010 Impreza, ~first month or two of ownership - dashboard went nuts and i pulled over. Car got towed to dealership - they found nothing wrong. Lost an evening and no loaner car in the ~48h it took them to determine 'nothing wrong'. Two 'new' cars - vastly better experience with one than the other.

Anecdotal of course; but

> even in warranty dealing with going to the dealership and getting the repair is a huge

You get that with any car - my Tacoma was indestructible and still had multiple recalls I had to drop it off for.

You are correct if you're talking driving a car into the ground though - I'd vastly rather have a 10 y/o v6 Taco than an 8 y/o supercharged Dakota.

Tesla also has quite the reputation for cheaply built cars that are outrageously expensive to repair

The flipside is that you hardly ever have to bring a Tesla into the shop. In the end they are fairly cheap to maintain.

https://www.automoblog.net/research/maintenance/tesla-mainte...

Outrageously expensive to repair sure (though which car isn’t these days, my corrolla got into a fender bender and fixing the bumper was north of $1000), but I’m talking about always in the shop due to shoddy construction. Afaik that doesn’t really apply to teslas.