Great comments, I thought this discusion was dead, just goes to show how valuble & and important this web site is. I know Linde makes good forklifts, I'm just relaying our experiance with our 352 model Linde's and the poor service from our local dealer. I had the oportunity to visit the Linde factory in South Carolina, we viewed the new model Linde's along with some abreviated tech training. Turns out the real Linde factory is in Germany, the S.C. factory is just a staging area where options are added or machines are repainted to customers spec's, at least for the counter balance machines. Anyone that has had the opportunity to work on the 352 model can tell you it's just a nightmare waiting to happen with the small access panel under the unit used to access hyd steel/rubber hoses assemblies to the v-belt replacement on the perkins engines, that have repeated water pump shafts breaking off because of everything hanging on the water pump shaft. Our machines had cabs with air conditioning, to replace the air conditioning v-belt you had to remove the air condioning compressor because of the "0" clearance between the compressor clutch and truck frame. After asking one of the Linde trainers what the trick was to replace the engine and A/C v-belts was, he said when you do replace the belts, just add extra belts and tie the out of the way for next time. The new model Lindes look good, they probably have a good product with that one but, you can have the best forklift in the world but without that dealer support there are worthless to any company. I to have 34 years plus 1 in the bussiness, have seen alot of makes and models come and go & until Linde becomes more established across th USA there going to have problems such as I have mentioned here. So for now I have no choice but to distance my companies location from Linde. Your comment about "buying cheap forklift trucks" I'm not sure where that came from but I know for certain the other major brands such as Yale and MCFA put out good machines, that are more established in the USA with product support.