I rented a Taurus back in the early '90s for a thousand-mile drive. At one point the window crank (which some cars still came with back then) fell off in my hand, fortunately with the window still closed as this was in December. I reported this when I returned the car and the rental place was like "yeah, of course it did" and they didn't even charge me anything extra.

I had a buddy who went to the GM institute for college and then went to work for GM in the late '80s. His first project involved tearing apart a Lexus and an Infiniti when these first came out and counting the number of production defects they found. He said a typical American car at the time had 300-400 defects. The Inifiniti they tore down had 2; the Lexus had 0.