If what you mean are brand new Korean vehicles then yes, I would prefer the Korean. Many Japanese vehicles that are here in our country are not actually even sold in Japan or most first world countries. The aforementioned cars are mostly made in Thailand and engineered for the third world market. And so these are obviously of lesser status and more unrefined as compared to the Korean vehicles sold here of which most if not all are sold internationally and conform to the highest safety, comfort and luxury standards of the most scrutinizing markets. Nowadays, Korean cars have very high resale values as well, at par with or even higher than those of its Japanese rivals. As for reliability, we would still have to see about that as the Koreans have only started improving not so long ago, but if you check out the first generation Starex CRDi's you'll see that many have already piled up lots of kilometers on the clock which should say quite a lot about its reliability.