We bought an AEG recently- again, no longer German made, they're part of Electrolux now, and manufacturing has been moved to $CHEAPERPLACE. Seems pretty well built though.
It's got an induction motor, which means it's really, really quiet. And it doesn't have any brushes to wear out, which is what pushed the (12 year old) Hotpoint past the Not Worth Repairing point.
Induction motor would definitely be worth looking for - was it obvious on the spec sheet?
As for brushes, I suspect that's one of those things where a ten pound part runs into minimum labour or callout charges. Certainly changing them on our old machine was a tedious, tedious job, but buying a set on ebay was trivial in cost: I think I've got some spares somewhere safe because it was cheaper to buy a couple of sets than pay extra postage.
Induction motor was clearly mentioned on the spec sheet on the AEG website, can't remember if it was called out on the John Lewis description. You have to go several models up the range before it starts being a feature, but we got a bit of a bargain with an end of line that JL appeared to have bought all the remaining stock of.
I could have got some brushes for about a tenner, (once I'd worked out which of the different motors that model might have come with was correct...) but by the time they arrived we'd have wasted plenty of money on service washes at the launderette, there was no way I was getting the belt back on without an epic struggle and skinning all of my knuckles, it wouldn't have fixed the lacklustre cleaning capability, and chances are that something else would have gone wrong before long.
Put it on freecycle for someone else to take a chance on fixing: no takers.
