You have to put into perspective the number of failures against the number produced. It will be a tiny percentage but we only hear about the broken ones. And some of those will be because they have not been mainatined correctly, chipped or thrashed (perhaps all 3).

Take the Ford 1.6 TDCI as an example. read on this forum and you would think there would be dead cars fitted with this engine littering the worlds roads but there are not. Failures have occurred but a vast majority have been fine, our old one is still going strong and its approaching 10 years old now.

If you avoided every car that had a problem reported about it on the internet you would never buy a car.

If you like the car buy it but make sure you get a good warranty that covers timing chains etc (just in case).

Maybe, but a hell of a lot of Japanese cars are chipped - I believe they are the car of choice for most as they appear to be able to 'take' the extra power - maybe that's 'over-engineering', which is fine by me. Maybe some of the European makes need to up their components' stress tollerances, as there appears to be a growing number of faults on their cars these days - maybe it also has to do with them having a much larger range of components/options than the Japanese makes - testing might be more thorough if that was the case as they'd have more time to test them.