I just read the latest HJ Q&A on his advice collumn in the Telegraph online:

www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/caradvice/honestjohn/...l

...and it rather worries me that this door locking fault appears to be a long-standing (20+ years on VAG cars) problem across the entire VAG range. I've started to look for a replacement for my Mazda 3, and was generally impressed by the new SEAT Leon (both guises), but am still put off VAG/German cars generally by the long list of similar long-standing faults compared to the best (in terms of build quality/reliability) that Japan has to offer.

This is all strange given how often that the German marques love to profess the quality of their engineering/build for their cars, and yet we continually hear of such quality/reliability issues (which to me appear to be design faults [I keep hearing of reduced testing of new parts in modern cars - maybe the Far Eastern makes have got it right by limiting the complexity/range of models?]) on this and other forums.