Reliability? Maybe. Value? Possibly Safety? No way....

BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo are the safety innovation power houses of the automotive industry. New safety features and structural designs first appear in these three brands and then trickle down to the Japanese premium market a few years later, and then to the American market a decade or so after that. Without BMW, MBZ, and Volvo we would all still be driving around in shoddy deathtraps.

Come to think of it, I can't really put my finger on any safety "first" that has come from a Japanese brand. Volvo, Mercedes and BMW have each brought cutting edge safety engineering to the masses. These are the companies that pioneered the crumple zone, front airbags, side airbags, head protection airbags, ABS, Stability control, brake assist, interlocking door anchors, battery safety terminal, seat belt pretensioners, seat belt force limiters, disc brakes, strong unibody structures... I could literally list a few pages of things like this.

In fact, until very recently, Acura, Lexus, and especially Infiniti were receiving embarassing crash test scores, while the European brands were getting "best picks." Just take a look at http://www.iihs.org/vehicle_ratings/ratings.htm and see for yourself. 4 years ago, the BMW 5 series and Mercedes E class were tested by the IIHS and received “best pick" ratings with greens across the board. Only one Japanese Luxury car, the Lexus LS400 achieved such a rating.. Even today, the Japanese are still playing catch up to achieve the safety levels that the European brands hade achieved 10+ years ago. Various new models from Acura, Infiniti and Lexus are getting marked down in crash tests in areas like "structure/safety cage" and injury measurements for "head and neck" "chest" and "legs.” Take our G for example, it's score got slashed for inadequate "head and neck" protection while cars such as the enemy BMW 3 and Merc C class have all perfects.

Another example is the BMW X5, which was rated the safest vehicle ever tested by the IIHS. The Infiniti FX got an overall good score, but it was tarnished by an "acceptable" head injury measurement.

I would imagine that if you were to ratchet up the impact speeds from 40mph to say 60mph and retested all the current models, we would probably once again see a large performance spread with the Germans high up on the list and the Japanese below in the middle tier.

Anyway, I love my gorgeous black obsidian G35 coupe 6mt, but if I were shopping for cutting edge, top notch safety, I would have spent the money elsewhere...