Been there. The ugly old Whirlpool from the early '90's that came with my house did a sparkling beautiful job of it. I miss that DW. Not the ugly part, but the rest of it. Six years ago,. I was led down a primrose path by a new Viking that looked to be well designed and had a "hot air blower" but turned out to just kind of breathe on the dishes rather than drying them at all. The tech said he had lots of complaints, but that it was working the way it was designed to. Viking took it back. I ended up with the Monogram, because it was close enough in price for a direct swap at the store, and it has a heater. I don't know if the newer ones do. So, on the regular cycle the dishes come out wet. It has options for added heat and heated dry. Then the heavier dishes come out dryish. Add plastics cycle, and the dishes all come out dry--but that might also be because I changed to Method Smarty Dish tabs. They have a certain amount of rinse aid in them, I think. Not enough to make the glasses taste soapy. The old Whirlpool cleaned brilliantly with the mildest detergent and no rinse aid. I have to be careful not to put things in that have bits of food on them, because they won't come off. Goo, yes, but a little piece of lettuce, no.

AJMadison shows some Whirlpools, as well as a GE and a couple of Amanas (though Amana is a subsidiary of Whirlpool), with heated dry options. They're probably all older design models.

Good luck.

Thank you Plllog! I will look into Whirlpools. I know some dishwashers still have a drying element.

I really want to avoid using rinse aid

An old Kitchen Aid DW from the 70's on Ebay will bake your dishes completely dry.

So will a new KA Wall Oven.

No Miele has bake dry nor does Asko. Only extra time for condensation dry option.

If you insist on European and Bake Dry look for Bosch with ExtraShine option. Some online stores will list that under concealed heating element option. The ToL 38 dBA and 39 dBA Bosch Benchmark Series are hergestellt in Deutschland.

BTW Asko is no longer made in Sweden. Since being purchased by Gorenje they are now made in Slovenia alongside Gorenje appliances.

Anna Cunningham,

Some complaints have been noted on recent models that have an element and heated dry so units so-featured are not assured of meeting your drying performance expectations. Drying elements nowadays by-and-large operate at lower wattages and may cycle on/off during the drying period to reduce energy consumption. Rinse aid typically is needed for acceptable drying results from all dishwashers nowadays.

As dadoes said...many of the machines are not going to dry the way older machines do. This has a great deal to do with government regulations for energy use which favor non heated drying.

The KA/Whirlpool models are pretty good at drying. The GE Monogam also has a nift MAX dry which uses heated drying plus a fan element to get pretty great results (at the expense of run times...some of the monogram cycles run 3-4 hours)