Buying a Car (again) - and the power of the media

We recently went through the process of buying a car.   There are a lot of models to choose from in the category we were looking at, and the biggest issue was to reduce the number of possibilities to a manageable "short list".  Several models didn't make it to the "short list" for reasons that might be considered quite trivial.   And then the final decision (for us) turned on quite small details. 

VW was one of the brands we considered.    However, in such a competitive market, the report in the Age today (on the front page),  had it appeared earlier, would have eliminated this brand from our thinking ("eliminated"?  The expressions "ejected" and " totally expelled" also come to mind!), just because of the doubts that it raises.  This is in spite of the fact that not a lot of evidence is put forward by the Age:  there has been no final verdict in the case before the Coroner, and although some other instances of power loss are mentioned, only one other specific case is described (potentially, of course, more may emerge).  It's also interesting that a couple of other brands are stated to have cases where vehicles have gone "limp".