I can't imagine buying a car online, let alone a used car. For something that can cost half a year's wages and is like a home-away-from-home for me, not being able to see and inspect something before committing to buying it seems ridiculous. But then again, I'm sure some people buy actual houses sight-unseen, so to them a car is peanuts.
So is there evidence that that is true? I ask because it seems that good engineering can make up for complexity at least sometimes. I remember when the 2nd gen Prius came out in the US (the 2nd version was the first to reach here) my friends and I expected it to be an unreliable mess. "It has both a gas and an electric propulsion system - no way that's going to work for long!"
But as we all know it was not just reliable, it was more reliable than most of the rest of the "simpler" Toyotas.
So are we really seeing declining reliability across the board?
Anecdotal evidence at best. I could drive my first car (a ca. 2006 VW Polo) till it was completely falling apart. Everything, including the electrical wiring was something you could easily fix with common parts. Once my brother had the car for a year and he destroyed the motor because he didn't think about putting in oil at all. A new motor was 500 Euros including the work.
Skip to a new generation Audio SUV my father owns. He (a technically skilled car guy) cannot exchange the headlights himself, because there is some software part to it as well (and while he is mechanically skilled, software is not his forte). One headlight was 250 Euros parts cost, you have to disassemble half of the motor block to unscrew it.
He had constant issues with the car where some sensor or one of the many components was acting up, PCBs that had to be exchanged and so on. Same is happening with many people I know who have new cars of the past ca. 5 years.
My old Polo wasn't the most luxurios car, but if you treated it the right way it was very reliable at getting you where you wanted to be – which is quite an important attribute for a car to have. My girlfriends new car had 4 failures that lead to her being stranded in the middle of the trip in the first 6 months of her owning it. All related to electronics and sensors.
