J.D. Power Auto Dependability Ranking

[VXD959]

Isuzu scores 368 problems (average 273) / 100 vehicles

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/1986725

[Dallas4u]

Volkswagen = 391

Wow, I guess I didn't expect that.

[paultvx]

LMAO. The beauty of advertising.

VWs aren't as spotless as they'd like to project. Owned one. While it was fun, it wasn't exactly perfect.

[IsuZOOM]

VW / Audi have had spotty reliability for ... ever? Check Consumer Reports, they always give them great reviews but say they always hear tons about bad reliability.

My sis just got out of a problematic '01 Jetta that had her contemplating a lawsuit under the lemon law, before giving up and trading it in on an '02 CR-V.

[paultvx]

Consumer Reports is extremely biased. It's a well known fact. The products are often reviewed by writers who know little to nothing about the subject they're assigned to. A friend bought a PC system based solely on the advice of CR. Within a week it became painfully obvious that he paid over $600 more on a lesser system than what he could've gotten if he had shopped on his own. As with any established commerical body that reviews products (like car magazines) you have to take what they say with a grain of salt.

I've come to the conclusion that if you spend less than $50,000 on a car... you can't expect it to be perfect. Just about every car made has problems. Hondas have their own share of problems. They are, however, well engineered... which is why they raised the bar for all others in the 80s and 90s. However, having gone to the wrecking yard to look at my sister's Honda the day after her fatal accident took place in '93, I'd rather get in a wreck behind the wheel of an Audi.

To be fair... VW Audi group has made leaps in engineering, production, and quality since the troubled days of the late 80s and early 90s. The Audi A4 is one of the best cars built to date. On its debut it instantly became the standard for how a car is built and assembled. Under the skin the Passat is essentially identical to the A4. Much of the technology used in the A4 has trasnfered to the rest of the VW/Audi line. Comparing the new Mk4 Golf/GTI to the 98 Mk3 GTI I had... there's no comparison. It's like comparing a Mercedes to a Yugo. Much of the stigma surrounding Audi comes from misunderstanding and false impressions propagated by media (like CR). The sudden acceleration issue in the early 90s, for example, was nothing more than a simple matter of Americans not accustomed to having the gas pedal near the brake pedal... which is a setup the Europeans like and are used to because that configuration is perfect for heel-toe shifting. Audi kept the same configuration in cars with automatic transmissions in order to save production cost.

As for Honda's reputation... the beauty of advertising. Anyone in the ad business will tell you the same.

[IsuZOOM]

Lots of folks are convinced that CU is baised, but the reliability data is just compiled from surveys they send out every year. Those don't lie.

[driver3]

I got a jd power survey and filled it out for the VX... all they asked was if I liked it, and the rest was what magazines I liked... so 1/2 page of do I like it, and 3 pages of magazines.. what a joke. JD power is crap. I don't know about the CU report, but I say if you want a review, come to a site like this and check out what people really think that own the vehicle.

[AnalogVX]

Originally posted by IsuZOOM
Lots of folks are convinced that CU is baised, but the reliability data is just compiled from surveys they send out every year. Those don't lie.

As goes the adage that more people will let their friends know if they are unhappy with service, performance, reliablity etc. So I would tend to believe that more unhappy customers would have taken the time to return a survey even if it was just to vent. I am leary of any survey as the the results can be scewed to reflect just about anything you want if given to the right demographic.
;)

[WyrreJ]

I was doing a client visit for about a week about 5 or 6 years ago with VW at their Wolfsburg plant and while I was there I saw an employee's VW catch fire and burn the cabin interior completely to ashes. He had been driving to work (the plant is HUGE so I guess he was technically driving at work) and was lucky to have escaped, he had to abandon it in the middle of the road. The guys I was there to see said that those kinds of things don't happen every day, but they happen often enough that they weren't surprised.

Meanwhile, two points about Consumer Reports - their readers are not enthusiasts, their criteria for evaluating a product is value to the average joe -- that's why you hear audiophiles laughing about CR's stereo reviews, videophiles who have coronaries when they hear that CR says that all DVD players are the same in picture quality so buy on price, pc geeks who totally diss their home computer reviews (and for PCs in particular there is no way you can expect a print publication to be current with the market) as well as car enthusiasts who scoff at their consistent picks of various family sedans as their editor's choices.

If you want the hardcore reviews of products, stay away from CR -- if you just want to buy something to do the job and get reasonable value for a reasonable price and you really don't care about the details, then CR is the place to go. The one characteristic that CR has over every other source of product reviews is that they will go to the ends of the earth to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest. They don't accept advertising, they don't accept free/discounted review merchandise, they don't even tell the merchants that sell them product that the buyer is there for CR. They won't even let a company use their reviews, no matter how positive, in any form of advertising.

Where it is biased, and they make no secret of this, is in having a liberal editorial viewpoint. But, at least they are up front about that - unlike just about all other review publications that take some form of compensation from the vendor's supply chain without informing the public.

On the matter of the reliability surveys, those do come from a self-selecting group - only members of Consumer's Union are able to participate and then only those that actually send in the survey's get counted. So they are not a truly random sample of the population. Nevertheless, the results of the surveys tend to be in line with most peopple's reality.

[Heraclid]

Anyone remember the old Audi 5000s that were running over peoples' kids? Think the accelerators were sticking or something ? I remember it being a big deal for a while.

You have to take some of these things with a grain of salt. Not a few reviews said the Vehicross had no rear door handle, and one even has a picture of a guy using it right next to where it says it. I have an article that says the Vehicross is "not quite the renaissance man of off-roading" and that it is "incapable of dropping one wheel way down low to pick up traction while another is up on a rock". Say what?! Now how many pictures do you think we have that could prove otherwise?

Also, you may remember the Trooper/Acura SLX situation several years ago in which a magazine rated both models unacceptable for worse than average rollover potential. I believe later data showed the tests to be somewhat faulty.

Speaking of rollover stability, I go by a Land Rover dealership daily and they have a cobblestone path on a steep bank next to a lake, and they park the Rovers there for show, and you would not believe one of em'... parked on a steep left to right bank... if that thing were the least bit tipsy it would go for a swim. It's really impressive-looking.

[paultvx]

Originally posted by IsuZOOM
Lots of folks are convinced that CU is baised, but the reliability data is just compiled from surveys they send out every year. Those don't lie.

Anyone who has learned about statistics knows that data is only as good as the way it is collected. A very wise man once said, "there are three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies, and statistics."

Anyone trained in the art of statistics can design a survey that will produce the desired result. It's all a matter of how the questions are phrased and who you ask to take the survey. And it is more of an art than science... because it uses science to create perception/deception. As far as I am concerned... the info CR, JD Powers, and CARFAX spew out don't mean jack. Like someone else said, people who are unhappy are more likely to jump at the chance of filling out a survey... mean those who are happy could care less. I've tried to read CR a couple times, they've even sent me free copies in the past trying to lure me into signing up. Each time I tried reading it I ended up throwing it away after half of a page. CR is written for people who don't want to think.

The whole purpose of polling and compiling statistics is to give support to some drawn up conclusion... to make certain ideas more palatable. Think about it... why would you trust a stranger's experience and advice over your own? If someone tells you a particular dish takes great, would you take their word for it and leave it at that? No. You'd rather try it for yourself.


Originally posted by Heraclid
[B]Anyone remember the old Audi 5000s that were running over peoples' kids? Think the accelerators were sticking or something ? I remember it being a big deal for a while.

How many times have you heard of law suits that were for personal injury resulting from user error? Hot coffee anyone?

I bet you who ever did that with their Audi 5000 either had aftermarket floormat that didn't fit or had the factory one in the wrong place. I pretty much did the same thing with my cammed 98 VW GTI VR6. Gas pedal got stuck on the carpet mat and nearly broke triple digits going through the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco. Not good... but it was fun. ;) Luckily, the street was empty and I was able to free the pedal with my toe right at the end of the tunnel. Needless to say... once I found out how fun it was to go through the tunnel with panache... Uhhh, I better end the story there. Damn I miss that yellow go-cart. The sound of a pressed VR6 is intoxicating.

[WyrreJ]

The whole purpose of polling and compiling statistics is to give support to some drawn up conclusion... to make certain ideas more palatable. Think about it... why would you trust a stranger's experience and advice over your own? If someone tells you a particular dish takes great, would you take their word for it and leave it at that? No. You'd rather try it for yourself.

No, I don't think so. Who wants to try driving 20+ different car models for five years each to find out which ones are more reliable? Plus then you'd have to worry if the particular cars that you just spent a lifetime or two driving were representative of fleet-wide build quality or just outliers on the spectrum.

[IsuZOOM]

The survey (which I participate in) is like this:

1) What year / make / model do you drive?
2) Have you had problems that required service by the dealer in these 20 categories (yes/no)? (and then a list of lots of categories, like brakes, electrical, HVAC, trim, paint, etc)

[nocturnalVX]

I let one of my uncles drive my VX, and the first time he went to stop he couldn't. It was like no matter how hard he pressed the brake the VX just refused to stop. Sure enough he was hitting both the brake & the GAS at the same time. Freaked him out bigtime, but luckily there was nobody in front of us and I told him to cut it out. Needless to say he has never driven the VX again, and I never thought to sue ISUZU over "run away acceleration".

[Heraclid]

I have hit the gas and brake simultaneously a few times, and this happened in stop-and-go traffic with someone right in front of me, fortunately without incident. For a while I was very conscious of it, but pretty soon I developed a sort of automatic muscle memory thing for it and it has not been happening lately.

[IsuZOOM]

That's not what happened on the Audi's (and VW), it was sudden unintended acceleration (SUA). Audi's excuse was pedal misapplication (pressing the wrong pedal) but it was something to do with the cruise control. Something like 2,000 people reported the problem.