I’m sure modern British cars are better now that British Leyland is dead and buried and that major British brands are influenced by German engineering.
There was an old adage, the poms invent stuff, the Americans make it work and the Japanese make it so all can afford one, that was true 25 years ago, probably needs amending today.
A tale of two small Diesel engines. I had a ship with a Gardner main engine, a straight 8 cylinder 8L3B, a ten ft long monster producing a mere 250 bhp. It was magnificently engineered, every nut and bolt were selected on sound engineering principles to have the correct torque and size. All joining surfaces were highly polished so that gasket paper was not required, injectors were tucked away out of sight under some fancy plates, in fact a work of art.
The result was that over time all the joints leaked oil so that we had to almost wrap the thing in a nappy, it needed a $5000 toolbox to maintain it because every fitting was engineered to spec so every fitting was different, not only in size but when coupled with the fittings you needed a set of AF, of Whitworth, of SAE and a set of metric to do any meaningful work on it. And finally the dealerships were so poor that if a problem occurred you waited weeks before resolution and any repair or servicing took more than double the amount of time one would expect
Engine number two was a small (35 kva) harbour generator prime mover, a Yanmar 3TL. This engine must have been the auxiliary on Noah’s Ark It must have been used to power every small,junk and fishing boat in SEAsia. It even had a decompression lever and in an emergency it could be hand started. It had gaskets on every joint (the best use for old charts) it never leaked a drop, it could be maintained, totally, with three metric spanners 13mm, 17mm and 19mm, and you could complete a 250 hourly in less than 30 mins, It passed 20,000 hours and was still pulling full power and was still in use until finally it became so old that even Yanmar had trouble finding parts
The dichotomy was so glaring, on one hand we had a machine that was beautifully made, precision engineered and yet it was the biggest pain in the arse to own (Jaguar) and on the other, an ugly little chugger that looked and sounded awe full that simply kept on giving with little bother for decades.(Toyota)
Anyway, just saying