This is a very American point of view but you forgot that Japanese and other cars are sold all over the world and usually sold as cheap middle class type of car

This is a very American point of view but you forgot that Japanese and other cars are sold all over the world and usually sold as cheap middle class type of car. Still, their reputation is the same all over the world where people don't maintain them more than they maintain a ford and certainly not maintained as premium European brands bought by upper middle class like BMW or Mercedes. You touched the subject of design and this is also part of the reason, Toyota sells the largest number of cars in the world and have huge amount of data which they use to perfect the design and fix weak points, this helps a lot to make their cars last longer than other vehicles in the same price range and category.