Living in upstate NY, it's rare to see cars more than 15 years old on the road. Metal cars rot out from corrosion to the point where they're not worth fixing after a little over a decade. For example, I used to own a 2005 VW Jetta which I really liked but I've not seen a VW Jetta or Golf of that vintage on the road in a long time.

It's not just the European cars which rot out due to corrosion around here, all makes and models do it. No one brand is terrifically worse than any other in terms of corroding away due to winter use.

A good number of people apply "undercoating" treatments to their cars around here. The creeping oil type treatments seem to provide a reasonable amount of protection with few downsides other than getting really messy when you need to work on the underside of the car. The rubberized types, if not applied properly and prior to any corrosion starting, seem to do more harm than good. But even undercoated cars will eventually succumb to corrosion. If you want a car to last here you store it away from about November till April.

In late 2019, I finally unloaded a 1997 2-seater I hadn't driven in the winter for quite a long time. The car was from the last model year (Honda del Sol) and was a minor cult thing. Latterly, the mechanics at the dealer always gathered round to look at it as basically you never saw them in the wild in the Northeast any longer.

We just use the local carwash that blasts your undercarriage to get the salt off. Everytime it snows, the line at the carwash a few days later is long...

Chiming in from the Midwest USA: cars manufactured with galvanized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanization) metal seem to fair better in my experience. That said, galvanization isn't terribly common and as you mentioned, if you really care about your car you should store it in the winter.

European cars have more complexity, so more things that can break that requires expensive parts especially things that makes it more comfortable to drive on roads that are rarely flat or straight. There's less space for parking and more public transport in Europe so the second hand vehicle market is constrained so there's less incentive to make the cars last longer to retain resale value. Western European climate is wetter so corrosion used to be a big issue but it's much less so with modern materials. There's also a critical mass issue, e.g. Toyota is not so popular in some parts of Europe so the parts end up more expensive than say for VW parts.

My tip is to buy a car that's relatively popular where you are and in that area have a reputation for reliability and maintainability because this is actually different depending on where in the world you are.

For example I drive a first generation Land Rover Freelander in the UK that's 17 years old and it's the most reliable and maintainable vehicle I've had in the 5 different countries that I've lived in, but to most people around the world it would sound like I'm completely insane.

European cars, especially German ones, are built for company leasing markets almost exclusively. After the 5 year lease is up, it will be resold. To make more money for the manufacturer, it needs to start breaking down and requiring parts at that point. So everything is engineered to last exactly 5 years.

I don't know about Germany, but The Netherlands has a significant market for second hand cars, and many cars, including German ones, are sold for serious amounts of money when they are 10 years old.

It is instructive to go to scrapyards. Typically many parts of a car are quite cheap. Some parts has some sort of design error and fail in almost all cars of the same model. However that varies from model to model and from brand to brand.

Of course, the lease market prefers low maintainance costs. So it makes sense for manufactures to optimize in reducing those costs during typical maintainance periods. But that does not imply that after 5 years or so, maintainance is suddenly sky high.

Huh, well that makes sense.

When I first travelled to München for work, I was amazed at the amount of luxury cars driving around Schwabing, until a German colleague mentioned that they were all most likely leased.

München is the most expensive city to live in in Germany. If you commute there you probably use public transport, if you life there you earn enough that you probably have a company car.

In Germany about 1/8th of all cars and 2/3 of all new cars are company cars.

A while after college, my wife moved to San Francisco from upstate New York. The first mechanic she took her car to asked whether she took the car to the beach a lot. He was not used to cars driven on salted roads.

What I learned recently is that Japan (where I've only lived) is one of the country that has snowiest (not coldest) cities. I had thought norway or somewhere near is more snowiest but isn't. Maybe due to snower places aren't developed?

https://snownotes.org/japan-one-of-the-major-snowest-country...

Possibly it makes Japanese car relatively solid for snow. (But note that most car manufacturer's HQ/R&D isn't located in snowy city)