As a current VW owner and owner of 3 VWs at one point I can speak to how they cut costs. Between the 3 vehicles that I personally owned and drove we have more

As a current VW owner and owner of 3 VWs at one point I can speak to how they cut costs. Between the 3 vehicles that I personally owned and drove we have more than half a million miles in VW cars. As you suggest and as any long-term VW owner can attest, they cut corners everywhere. From experience - some wire harness sections are minimum gauge for the load that they potentially carry creating a fire hazard; interior lighting may be reliable in some cars and bulbs may tend to burn out in other similar cars due to use of less expensive bulbs; plastic components do not survive many flexing cycles before breaking due to the plastic being very thin in the panels and especially in the attachment gussets; microswitches that control the door locks, door alarm and window switches tend to fail also. In addition, the headlight pods on the Beetle slide into the front fenders and should be held securely but over time the mechanism that keeps them firmly connected to the bulb socket develops enough slack that the pods can slide forward enough to break connection and kill your headlights. One or both will develop this problem and VW dealerships will gladly sell you new bulbs or new pods when the problem can be fixed by adding additional attachment under the hood so that the pod can't slide forward while the vehicle is being driven. It may sound strange for someone who has driven their vehicles for so many miles to be complaining about stuff like this but I also own vehicles from Ford and Nissan and have never had similar problems with those vehicles. My old Bronco, '92 model, still looks new on the inside with >300k miles and my '01 Pathfinder looks brand new with 230k miles. I currently own three Fords with a combined mileage >840k miles, two Broncos and one F150. I have owned and later sold 3 others in the last 30 years after rolling up more than 400k miles between them. I also have owned another Nissan that we sold years ago after racking up a lot of miles with no issues. And then there was the Saab, but that's probably just another Saab story. I just wanted to give real life examples from personal experience so that people could understand I'm not a hater who has no experience with the vehicles. I'm actually someone who bought one and loved it enough to buy others and drive them for a long time.