The local Subaru dealer tries to convince me dat Subaru's (Legacy for instance) are much more reliable en has much lower running costs than my current '99 Volvo S80 TDi. I make about 40k kilometers per year.
This will sound disloyal, but what the .... I own Outback 2002 and I love it but I don't think I'd change S80 TDi for Legacy. Maybe for Outback H6 3.0R. OK, just kidding. :-)
Anyway, friend of mine has V70 here in Pacific North West (British Columbia, Canada, Washington/Oregon, USA) and I'll tell you that he had spent more money on maintenance for his Volvo then me on my Outback. Parts and labor for Volvo are more expensive then for Subaru, that's for sure. Then again Pacific North West is know as Subaruland. It could be that in Europe it is different ball game.
Volvo's good reputation is well known as well as Subaru's.
I know one thing for sure. It would be really hard, I mean haaaaard to switch to FWD or RWD now that I've tried AWD. :-)
There was a video that did a comparason between Subaru AWD and Volve's AWD, test #1 was to hill (muddy) climbing, test #2 was pulling trailer. Subaru did not have any problem but Volve did.
When doing research before buying my OBW, I found several web sites that all concurred about overall reliability. In rank order, they said reliable cars were:
Japanese
European
American
With1. Toyota and Honda
Subaru and Nissan
Everyone else
More recently, I've read news reports that European cars have gone down and American cars have gotten better, but I don't know how much, and that Subaru is thought to be as reliable as T and H (Edmunds.com, New York Times).
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