> their ICE cars are notorious for being unreliable compared to the Japanese car-makers.

I always read this online, but my personal experience in EU doesn't match that at all in quite a sample of people and cards of last ~15 years. At least not for older cards. The reliability after 100k km seems to be somewhat similar.

The repairability of VW-group stuff in 3rd party services is soo much better and cheaper. The WV-group is huge and many models across the brands share same parts and full engines. There exist non-OEM alternatives and people know how to fix those cars.

I have never bought new car. But driving anything but VW got expensive fast.

Toyota cars can have bespoke parts even between different parts of the year for the same model. Continuous improvement isn't really that cool for cars.