Benoit

Germany's ADAC is one of the mightiest automobile clubs in germany. Like TCS in Switzerland, they are not only the peoples towing your broken car, but they also have all sorts of parrallel services. Like the "election of the most beloved consumer car", the reliability ranking and even a kind of car test portal.
Whatever, ADAC was also caught into a scandal of paid rankings for the "best loved car in germany", where german carmakers spent good money to claim top positions.
https://www.aboalarm.de/blog/allgeme...andal-chronik/
ADAC also has a rather sulfuric reputation, having some strange kind of contracts, making carmakers having a special contract with the ADAC, not having an incidence on their general reliability chart when their car is towed by them.

Lately, I was watching a car test on their portal, and I cringed when I was falling on the test of the RC200t
https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/test...px?IDTest=5445

The test is not bad, in respect to other aspects, but when, out of the blue, one critic point comes up in the summary that I'm not understanding.
I Quote : - teurer Unterhalt (meaning : high maintenance fees)
This isn't announced anywhere in the test. It's just coming in the summary at the end. When I open up the Pdf test, that is quite a long one, they enter a little bit more in this point, saying that they haven't the specific feedbacks on this car, "so they are refering to the usual values of this builder".

So why are Lexuses so pricey to maintain for the ADAC ? Especially when BMW's seem to not have those negative aspects.

gkcmilner

This might not still be relevant any more as it's been many years since I lived there, but they use to have very high tariffs on Japanese goods, making replacement parts (japan made) very expensive. Maybe this is what they were referring to.