Cars haven't become more reliable, that's for certain - if you are European, you've encountered your fair set of travesties. Manufacturers, in the pursuit of stringent Euro emission standards, nonsensical regulations, more horsepower, and reduced material and manufacturing costs have put out such a set of scrap-worthy engines. They typically have low displacement, few cylinders, small turbos, exhaust recirculation.

Ford's EcoBoost and Peugeot's Puretech engines come to mind in particular, with the latter being so bad, that they tend to fail well before 100k km, and there's an active investigation going on about it by European Commission.