I would question the thoroughness of the Pre Delivery Inspection (PDI) - what else did they miss? Did they even do a PDI?

Kick up a fuss. This fault should have been spotted and resolved before you picked the car up.

I thought the only action performed on the PDI was to pump all of the tyres up to between 40 and 50 PSI at random !

Not at all. The dealer must also ensure that all the wheel bolts have a dab of loctite applied and subsequently overtightened with an air gun.

Its hardly life threatening or a serious fault, you realised the speedo was faulty so used your judgement....you could have popped a sat nav on the dash and read the speed off that for a day or two, i would have done that till the parts arrived, but if you are happy with the courtesy car then so be it.

They should have picked the fault up but then some people would compain when their new car came with 50 miles on the clock because someone had road tested it properly, how should a car be driven on road test, does the mechanic take it up to 140mph to check its stability and blast it round a test track to check the handling and brakes?

Difficult to see how a PDI could otherwise pick the fault up with the car sitting on ramps and bloke in overalls going over the set routine.

Fair question from BD in the post above about reliability and choice of make.

"Best to try and keep it in perspective"-Hmmmm, try this perspective:-

The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986.

"every motor vehicle shall be fitted with a speedometer which, if the vehicle is first used on or after 1st April 1984, shall be capable of indicating speed in both miles per hour and kilometres per hour, either simultaneously or, by the operation of a switch, separately"

For a BMW dealership to supply a new vehicle which was not road legal because the speedo didn't work is incredibly lax,bearing in mind the current obsession with speed and speed limits. What would have been the outcome if the driver had been fined or banned because he had unwittingly exceeded a speed limit?

"And they themselves are being killed by being undercut by cheaper Korean competition. Quality control costs money."

Yes, we can see that in the current Warranty Direct top 100 reliability figures:-

There is one korean car in the top ten, the Picanto, admittedly first, of the rest, 7 are of Japanese design or origin.

Of the bottom ten:- there is one Japanese and one Korean the rest is the usual dross.

quod erat demonstrandum

I,in common with most experienced car owners, just want a car that performs well, is stylish, has reasonable economy, is properly engineered, has good dealer and parts backup, and that when it's started on a cold morning the dashboard doesn't look like the instrument panel in the control module of Apollo 13 just after they said "Houston we have a problem"-

Bitter experience has taught me that the car just has to be from a Japanese manufacturer-is all.