The German car industry is a prime example of how greed ruins sales. The decline of their quality started in the mid 1990s, and has a name: The Lopez Effect. After the CEO of VW back then who did famously increase profits by systematically decreasing product quality, and coercing parts manufacturers into unsustainable low pricing.

On top of reducing their quality, they re-focused on the international upscale market, and raised their prices, leading to fewer domestic sales. This can only work for so long, because, even with long-lived products such as cars, after some time, even the most stupid idiot will notice that you aren't selling a product worth the price you are asking and will stop buying from you. If you sprinkle in some good old fashioned enshittification (which was pioneered by the car industry even before enshittification became a word through the computer/IT industry discovering it and some dude writing a book about the phenomenon), in order to increase profits from repairs and servicing, you will hurt your long term sales even more, because nobody wants to buy a car that spends more time in the shop than on the road and needs expensive servicing at a licensed workshop for even the most trivial maintenance and repairs, such as changing a burnt-out light bulb.

If you know cars from the early 1990s and their quality and longevity, you cannot help but seeing modern cars as nothing but overpriced piles of garbage (I don't want to say "scrap", because modern cars are more cheap plastic than metal) that can't be kept in service for any prolonged time period without unsustainable costs due to impossible repairs.