Telegram had always impressed me for the same reasons. They have constantly gotten worse since about 2022/2023 though. Dark patterns, pay gate, they lost chat history for some of my closest contacts including 15k+ lost photos, no support at all. Something changed in their product direction and I started moving all my chats to Signal.
Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political.
The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.