Mercedes has gone the route of adding huge amounts of sophisticated electronic
systems to vehicles, without necessarily getting all the bugs out before
shipping them.  This is bad.

Mercedes actually makes some rugged, well-built, solid cars that are not
overburdened with stupid gewgaws and gadgets.  But they don't sell any
of those cars in the US.

As long as the American consumer is willing to pay more money for features
than reliability, Mercedes and Microsoft will continue cranking out products
with as much attention paid to features and as little to reliability.

BMW is starting to go the same way too, but at least they still have
manual transmissions available, and they sell enough manuals that
people in the US still know how to repair them.
--scott