Anything will last longer if it’s parked in the shop rather than out on the road. 
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During the 50s and 60s German car engineering was probably better than US and of course British, French and Italian auto engineering. By 1984 Japanese quality and reliability had surpassed US and German as well. German engineering was always more “sophisticated” and resulted in good handling cars, but durability and reliability were sacrificed and stagnated…
German industrial equipment by contrasts, is still World Class and its high price can be justified. German heavy duty Class 8 trucks are also well built.
Myths die slowly; there are still penthouse environmentalists that worship Volvos as being “moral” cars with respect to safety and reliability. A lowly Toyota Camry has all that in actual fact at a much lower price…
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The problem with German cars is that they stuff a lot of technical wizardry in them without sitting back to consider the idea that the end user might use it in a different way from the way they use it. And so when the end user does, things go haywire.
My favorite example that I think I’ve mentioned on here before is the cell phone module in the 3-series. It’s hooked into the other systems (nav, radio, etc) in series rather than parallel, which means if the cell phone module crashes, everything goes dark. And the cell phone module crashes if your phone isn’t one of the very small list of phones that the module is fully compatible with, because apparently they assumed that no one would ever try to pair a non-factory-approved phone to their beautiful cars, so why bother writing in error-handling code that rejects the connection when something incompatible tries to talk to it?