how is it that the cheapest cars (Camry/accord) are the most reliable and longest lasting compared to luxury cars that cost more?
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You need a large amount of data to detect reliability problems, and you need a large volume of production to justify engineering upgrades to fix those problems.
Suppose you have a part that fails once every 100 million miles driven. If you sell a model that only sells 10,000 vehicles and each vehicle only gets driven 10,000 miles a year, it might take you a full year to detect the problem. On the other hand, if you sell 1 million vehicles each year, it might only take you a week or so to detect the problem.
On the second point, if it takes $3 million in R&D to fix the problem, that increases the cost of the first model by $300 each but only increases the cost of the 2nd model by $3 each.
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