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Have Bad Cars Gone Extinct?
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that global competition is squeezing lemons out of the market and forcing automakers to improve the quality and reliability of their vehicles. With few exceptions, cars are so close on reliability that it's getting harder for companies to charge a premium. 'We don't have total clunkers like we used to,' says Dave Sargent, automotive vice president with J.D. Power. In 1998, J.D. Power and Associates found an industry average of 278 problems per 100 vehicles, but this year, the number fell to 132. In 1998, the most reliable car had 92 problems per 100 vehicles, while the least reliable had 517, a gap of 425. This year the gap closed to 284 problems. It wasn't always like this. In the 1990s, Honda and Toyota dominated in quality, especially in the key American market for small and midsize cars. Around 2006, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were heading into financial trouble and shifted research dollars from trucks to cars after years of neglect and spent more on engineering and parts to close the gap. Meanwhile Toyota's reputation was tarnished by a series of safety recalls, and Honda played conservative with new models that looked similar to the old ones. Now it's 'very hard to find products that aren't good anymore,' says Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of the Edmunds.com automotive website. 'In safety, performance and quality, the differences just don't have material impact.'"
if bad cars have gone extinct. take a seat, it will be a while before he's done laughing.
The author has obviously not driven a GM vehicle lately. Let me count the problems with my two year old Pontiac...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Of course lemons exist.
Lots of them. Its just that, now reliable cars number quite a bit.
but there still exist a set of people who think money can be saved by skimping on QC practices.
Its more of a mindset issue.
Other than that, if you have ever been part of a JD power survey, you would know what it actually is.
Here is an interesting link
http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian-car-scene/41820-my-experience-jd-power-quality-survey.html
So another question is.. are the right questions being answered?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
...is the price of gas.
Back then the general feeling was that Asian cars were better quality but based on this I always wondered how much was reality and how much unconscious bias.
In-car 'infotainment' and navigation systems are now becoming more common, so what we have gained in mechanical reliability we can make up in the endless sorrow of interacting with dubious software...
.. at least underneath.
I don't know how it is like in the US, but in Europe almost all the car manufacturers have consolidated. Cars are a commodity now. The cars from many different brands (e.g. VW, Audi, Skoda) all have the same chassis and parts. They all have the same body shape (more or less). Usually the only difference is in the body panels, the interior trim and the badge at the front.
As such you can pretty much buy any of the above cars, and you'll find that they all have similar reliability. For many people cars are just a method of getting from A-B, so overall the above is good news for them. They can pick based on things like warranty, extras included, financing options, etc.... while the cars are more or less the same.
For example, once upon a time in the west, Skoda's were considered lemons, now they are basically rebadged VW's with reliability to match. Now they are known as VW reliable cars, without the price tag and some extras that the VW's may have.
Not my thing personally, I prefer my cars unique, so I buy old cars built before the consolidation, but for the majority of people, it is a benefit.
is the fact that most new cars are very difficult for the owner to repair themselves, given that many are highly integrated with computer systems. Shade-tree mechanics are going to disappear.
That and the fact that every new car seems to be built on the principle that repair costs are no obstacle, so if a car gets hit, its highly damaged, extremely expensive to repair, and much more likely to be a write off - meaning you need to buy a replacement.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Go to any taxi rank in Germany (where almost all taxis are Mercedes). You won't have any trouble at all finding one with over 500,000 km on the clock.
No sig today...
Of being stranded on the side of I95 in the dead of summer with steam pouring out of the hood of a behemoth Ford.
TFA appears to emphasize the shrinking delta between the best and the worst(as well as the gradual decline of the average number of problems per 100 vehicles). 92 issues per 100 cars certainly isn't something you'd want out of your satellites; but for fairly modest definitions of 'problem' isn't too terribly surprising for complex mechanical devices, relatively cheap, in the hands of unskilled users.
The big news is not that the absolute reliability of the best-in-class has changed that much, though it has improved a touch; but that the average quality of the junk has increased quite sharply, narrowing the reliability gap considerably.
What I would suggest from my own reading of the J D Power surveys is that the gap at the top is much narrower, with a number of high quality manufacturers including the Germans, the Japanese and a few others fighting over quite small differences. If you buy a Merc, a VW (even if it is called a Skoda), a Porsche, a BMW, a Toyota or a Honda, you're unlikely to complain. Buy a recent Korean car and the same is likely to be true. And then you get into the long tail (I may have missed some good ones, I agree).
A modern clunker is better than an old clunker, true, but the customer dissatisfaction is going to be just as great. It's all relative. In the early 80s many American cars were...well, they got traded in after a year and the next owner was the QA and rectification department. But people accepted it. When a lock fell out of the door of my boss's car - sorry, Chrysler- he just said "Well, it's 11 months old, not worth fixing". Twenty years on, a lock broke on a colleague's ten year old Merc and he complained that German engineering wasn't what it was.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4orHdycJl4
renault authorised service centers don't even acknowledge it as a problem. in fact, one of their mechanics tried to pass it off as a feature.
i am at a loss for words
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
The average owner has a salary of $170,000, yet still needs a $7,500 tax credit (possibly jumping to $10,000 this year) to buy that piece of shit. One Chevy Volt owner told me he bought it to support Obama and save the environment (in that order). But he doesn't actually like it, so he still drives his BMW most of the time.
There's a big difference between "initial quality" reports and long term (5, 10, 15 year) reliability, though there is probably some correlation due to overall manufacturing control at the factory. Initial quality tells you if something was built correctly, for the most part. Long term reliability has more to do with the design and specifications of the car and its components. You can have a cheap car (or camera, or toy, etc.) that works fine out of the box and breaks in a short time due to cheap materials. Or you could have one built of high quality materials with fine tolerances that lasts effectively forever.
I work in the car industry. That means I am a hell of a lot more qualified than most
of you people to make an informed comment on the current state of the art in new
cars.
Cars now are junk, even very expensive cars. The "product cheapening department"
has found new ways to lower the production costs for cars, and this will come back
to haunt anyone who owns a car for more than a couple of years. Since only the wealthy or
the stupid buy new cars every couple of years, this means a lot of people are going to get
screwed by how the new cars are being built.
Such things as plastic intake manifolds, wiring which is as small as possible in gauge in order to
save copper, and even thinner body sheet metal all mean the cars you can buy today are more
of a disposable item than cars built a decade or more previously. Argue against this if you like,
but you will be wrong.
Or Iraq.
Those Mercedes taxis and dumptrucks were from the 60s and are still running just fine. Obviously with some ingenuity and crafty upkeep but still.
THL phish sticks
My 1982 Mercedes W123 has almost 500000km* and not only that, for the last 12 or so years, it has been modified to run on LPG (because it is cheaper) and I stil use LPG when I want to go somewhere more than a few km away (I can only switch the fuel source to "LPG" if the engine has warmed up**).
* probably already reached it, but the odometer has been replaced and the mechanic did not bother setting it to the same number as the old one.
** The process is like this (completely manual system):
1. If the engine is cold, switch on gasoline, start the engine.
2. When it has almost reached ~40C, turn off gasoline, drive (or wait) until the gasoline that is still in the carburetor is used up - I can usually go up to 1km on that.
3. Switch on LPG.
The body had some rust, but i had the car patched up. Also, it seems that I will need to replace all the door seals and the back window seal (I already replaced the front window seal) as 30 year old rubber is not known for its ability to keep water out.
Have Bad Cars Gone Extinct?
Nah, they're just hibernating. Once the car industry settles down again to only 2 to 3 major players, they'll be back.
Whenever a /. headline asks a question, the answer is always No.
Luckily new LPG cars switch automatically. Leave the switch where it is and just start. The controller will see the motortemp is to low for LPG and will feed gasoline to the engine. Once the temp is high enough it will switch to LPG automatically. The switch is just there to be able to switch to gasoline when the LPG is empty. This is usefull as most LPG fuel gauges aren't really accurate.
I have been driving LPG for years and never knew the carburator had to be emptied before switching to LPG. The controller seems to do that.
Then again I'm not sure there is a carburator under my hood. It may already be an injection engine (1997 Opel Astra 1.6 benzine). I'm not really a gear head.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
J.D. Power and Associates is an industry shill. You pay them money, and they come up with fake statistics and give you an award. "Best midsized fuel efficient sedan in the upper north-east for the first 2/3s of 2011!!!" Their stats are almost entirely made up, and even then they just fish around in them until your product comes out on top in some obscure way so they can give you a bullshit award. Likely this article is bought and paid for by some automotive industry association that's trying to bolster slumping sales. There are plenty of Lemons out there. Any Volkswagen, Jaguar, The "hummer", and on and on. Granted, the industry is getting better, but the fact that cars still last less than 10 years on average should be rather telling.
I have a 1982 300SD, which is a USA-only W126 with the OM617.951 5-cylinder turbo diesel. It has a fairly early but quite good Bosch Jetronic injection pump and glow system, and a Garrett Airesearch T3-pattern turbo. I have over 250,000 miles. The vehicle recently began leaking oil so I've been fiddling with it but in general it's in very good shape, and it performs very very well. About to fill it up with Delo 400; I've replaced the oil pressure sender and actually the whole turbocharger because the turbo was leaking oil and I just went to the yard and pulled another one for sixty bucks. Replacing the pan gasket too. All with common hand tools: 17, 13, 12, 10 mm wrenches and sockets, and a smallish hex drive (8mm? maybe less) to pull the lower oil pan.
My clear coat has totally failed and the paint is in the process of failing but I have no rust except in a couple replaceable items like the battery tray. I actually had the tray out to clear a mouse nest from beneath it and route a turbo gauge line, yesterday, and I can verify that there is no rust beneath it, though the tray itself is pretty rusty.
On the other hand, this engine has manually-adjusted valves, which is terrible. It is, however, a much more reliable way to proceed due to the higher temperatures of the diesel engine. The OM617 is actually designed to be run at an overheat condition for short periods. It's one of the best engines ever conceived by man. They are a fairly common swap into off-road Jeeps because they have massive torque and much more reliability than any engine Jeep ever used, plus incredible fuel economy. And it doesn't hurt that the electrical system can literally be scraped off the engine and you can continue operating because the "run" signal from the ignition switch is a vacuum signal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Try a Subaru. Great quality, and great in the snow, and they make nice wagons if you need the room. If you get a turbo model, they're also a blast to drive.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I always loved the saying: "In America, Mercedes are luxury vehicles, in Europe, they are taxis."
If they sold Tata, Lada, ZAZ, Geely, Chery, etc in the USA this story would never have been written.
If you're going to discuss Mercedes' vehicles it's important to distinguish between cars built 20 years ago, and Mercedes cars built today. None of the cars built today will ever make it 90 days without going back in for service. They're one of the LEAST reliable vehicles on the road. If you like service room free coffee, buy a Mercedes. (I learned my lesson, and talked to everybody else who also learned THEIR lesson.) Shitty, shitty vehicles today. They can't even keep their supercars on the road without an oil light going on. And it doesn't help that their sales staff think they should have egos. DO NOT BUY A MODERN MERCEDES!
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
8.11L/100km isn't bad for a non-diesel AWD vehicle, especially for one with three rows of seats. Heck the very best non-diesel, non-hybrid AWD vehicles without a third row get around 7.5L/100km (Mazda CX5/new Ford Escape). You can do a bit better with a small displacement diesel due to superior torque to engine weight but at $4-4.50/gallon the ~$4-5k higher purchase price is hard to justify if you don't plan to keep the vehicle to ~200k miles (yes I know I'm mixing units, I do price comparison in local units but have researched cars world wide so I'm familiar with the normal range for the kinds of vehicle's I'm interested in).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There's no way you could realistically pay someone who pays that close attention to detail to open every box of connectors and inspect each one for cracks. There's just no way. You'd go crazy looking over little white MOLEX connectors, 1000 per hour, 8 hours a day.
You know we have computer vision systems for that sort of thing, I have a friend who does computer vision systems that analyze millions of items an hour for minor defects.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
While mechanical failures may have decreased, design problems are all over the place, from Toyota's gas pedals getting stuck to the visibility-destroying A-columns in Dodge pickups. There is so much focus on appearance and stopping mechanical failure, they've stopped paying attention to how people actually drive and are decreasing safety because of it.
...in a much heavier vehicle, and the results weren't pretty as you found out, but they did address the problem in later models. I'm not a huge Honda fan, but I do own one that's given me zero problems in 5 years.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.