Why do Japanese cars have a reputation for being so much more reliable than their American or Euro counterparts?
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its arguably a matter of designers attention and car culture.
Americans car culture often romanticizes cars as a Symbol of Personal Freedom, of being a measure of a man, etc. Their was an expectation that “a Real Man ™” has a general level of mechanical knowledge and is capable of hand tool repairs or maintenance (think of how in most car movies, you see the hero with a wrench in hand, tweaking some bolt on a engine block, etc). They also motorised much earlier than everyone else, and interwar/early postwar cars needed a lot more operator maintenance to keep running, which fed into the expectations of both car makers and drivers that the driver would need to do maintenance to keep it running. what people prized was stuff like aesthetics, and performance, which lead to the 60s muscle cars with enormous engines and such.
to the Japanese…a car is a box you use to travel in. It doesn’t have the same cultural connotations, and drivers generally didn’t have the same mechanical backgrounds, so reliability was placed much higher up the priority list for designers. In short, they designed their cars for “non car” people.
Bear in mind this is in reference to comparative cars of the 70s and 80s, when the Japanese cars gained this reputation. Modern western cars are not notably less reliable than Japanese ones these days.
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