My years in "the trade" were spent in a variety of small family garages and a couple of large main dealers. I enjoyed the family owned businesses most, not just because the workforce was small and the atmosphere convivial, but also for the wide variety of vehicles and tasks you had to do. I was interested to see the comment earlier in this thread about "hating" a particular make of vehicle. My experience has been that all vehicles have good design points and bad but it's our job to mend them. For example I remember the first time I tackled a Peugeot torsion bar rear suspension with collapsed bearings. I was given one of the young "lads" to help and I remember him, half way through struggling with some seized fixings, asking why it was designed in this diabolical way? (or words to that effect!) and that he "hated it and would never buy one himself". My take on this is that I can't help the design, it's just our job to get on and fix it! Although I have to admit I hid in the oil store when the next one appeared so I wouldn't have to do it! The problems are model related not manufacture related and all manufacturers have good and bad models! Learning and avoiding the bad ones is the trick!
With diagnostics featuring so strongly in car repair today (and the expense) My own preference for FIAT & VAG products is because I have VCDS (VAG-COM) and now
Multiecuscan. Few other brands are so well provided for and have such readily, and cheaply, available spares. I'm also "steering" the family fleet of 6 vehicles, which were all diesel a couple of years ago, back towards petrol. Not so much for poluting reasons but because modern diesels are really quite significantly more expensive to repair and more difficult. DPF problems are rife because people are not educated correctly by the supplier or are sold a vehicle inappropriately (ie for a shopping car). Have you tried to get an injector out of a late model diesel? The length of the thing is ridiculous and the chances of it being siezed in place quite high. There is a whole business growing up around mobile workshops who come to you to hydraulically pull these things! And the cost? Phew, don't ask! High pressure pumps also occassionally break up and generously seed the entire system with very fine metalic dust so requiring not just the pump but all the hp pipes and injectors to be replaced as well. Direct injection petrol systems will probably develop problems too (early TSI pumps can wear the camshaft where the plunger bears on it but newer pumps now use a roller) but the petrol still seems, so far, easier and cheaper to rectify. This is not to say the diesel probably still has the edge for high mileage users and reliability as well as, probably, cleaner emissions (if used correctly) on newer examples.
Ok so it's looking as if we're going electric in the long term. Although, at 71 years old, it's not actually occupying too much of my thoughts! Hope someone's got a good plan for producing all the extra generating capacity that will be needed and for reducing the electricity lost during transmission and conversion from the point of generation to where it's needed and at the voltage required. On the face of it I think an electric car might be quite nice for everyday use, cheaper to maintain and more reliable. I believe they operate at quite high voltages though and the potential for high current with such large batteries is just a little frightening when you think about what might happen in the case of a really big shunt, or an inexperienced person "tinkering".
And just for finishers, and to bring us back onto the subject of my post much earlier. Don't you all think taking an old gross poluter, like my Tony, off the road and replacing him with a small, relatively cleaner petrol, like the Panda Dynamic Eco which I'm looking for for my Mrs at this time, makes a lot of sense? It's going to significantly reduce the pollution she's putting out going round the shops and, unlike us buying a brand new car, which is not even a remote possibility anyway (had to break into all 3 piggy banks and slaughter the pig itself to buy Twink) the used vehicle has already been manufacture so buying it has no manufacturing poluting factor! Win. Win? Surely? So why no scrappage allowance on poor old Tony in these circumstances?