I hear that argument a lot, and for a while I believed it. I am an engineer after all, and I do understand that all systems require maintenance. If anything, I'd say that mentality made me more likely to be okay with repeated major repairs. But German cars consistently require more frequent and more invasive maintenance to keep them running well. Just because your friend has one that happened to need less service than most doesn't mean they're all that way.
My grandmother owned an old BMW 3-series from the early 80's. She is the only person I know who owns/owned a German/Scandinavian car and wasn't constantly having to fix shit that nobody would ever expect to break. I, my old boss, my new boss' husband, several of my coworkers, several of my neighbors, people I've met online, mechanics at my shop who've seen everything that can possibly go wrong with every car on the road -- all of them were cursing their German cars within 3-5 years of buying them.
Reliability doesn't just mean that a few individual units run well without constant repairs, it also means the vast majority of units run well without constant repairs. Europeans in general seem to have a higher threshold for what they consider to be a reasonable service interval for their cars -- though it is rather amusing that European countries have had to slap huge tariffs on Japanese cars to keep people from buying them in droves. For my part, if I were going to own a European supercar and have to tolerate the endless stream of repairs it requires, I would at least want it to be more exclusive than a Porsche.
