I've gone the other way Jade. I'm not prepared to be any manufacturer's guinea pig any longer. I am of the absolutely certain opinion that one should steer clear of owning the "latest and greatest". My own experience and history have proven that the best cars to buy are the mid-life facelift models where the "bugs" have been ironed out.

Cars these days are an amalgamation of spectacular mechanical precision mated with mind-boggling systems management software. In a sense, cars are becoming more like cellular phones from early adopter's point of view; sure you can brandish your latest mobile communication device replete with GPS, Playstation games and laser bomb guidance but chances are it'll need a software patch sooner rather than later.

Cars are much more complex than cellphones and they too require endless testing and evaluation to ensure that the product is at least consumer ready to a point. But they don't always get all the problems sorted out. A hundred test cars can't mathematically yield the all possible failures that will emerge with the first 5000 cars sold.

Even something as mechanically robust and "relatively" low tech as a Subaru can benefit from a simple ECU Reflash as I had come to experience. The car performs ever so slightly better and I'm getting an extra 70 km per tank!

And it's not just limited to software, your car's local area network (formerly known as the good old wiring harness) also can wreak havoc with reliability, a famous example of which was the pre-facelift E-Class. The E270 CDI of which was particularly notorious.

Latest and greatest? Nah, keep 'em... I've been there and done that and suffered the consequences.