I meant that they're considered unreliable (different than "bad") in general regardless of location. Your reasoning really doesn't hold for Japanese cars in bot

I meant that they're considered unreliable (different than "bad") in general regardless of location. Your reasoning really doesn't hold for Japanese cars in both the US and most of Europe, in my experience. Import costs are rather trivial for cars between the US and EU/EEA. Most of the reputation of the unreliability of American and European is actually warranted (which is why it's generally shared across the ponds) and the rest tends to be due to national biases.