Filed under: Car Buying
J.D. Power Initial Quality Study analysis
When I bought my first new car, back in 1973, I’d been warned by friends to expect a good half dozen defects that would need to be straightened out by the dealer. It turned out there were only five, I quickly counted, before taking my little sedan back to the shop for repairs. I was lucky. The worst problem I had to deal with was a loose mirror. A college chum, meanwhile, got stuck with a bad transmission on the new Chevrolet he bought about the same time. But he took it in stride, as long as it got fixed right. And so did just about everyone else. Dealing with defects was a part of buying a car back then.
But things started to change even before I was ready to trade in. The twin oil shocks of the ’70s initially put the focus on fuel economy – more specifically on high-mileage imports. But as memories of gas lines faded, the emphasis shifted to the unexpectedly high quality the best of the Asians were delivering.
One could argue – as an NPR talk show host did during my appearance this morning – that J.D. Power and Associates, with surveys like the Initial Quality Study, made Toyota and Honda by quantifying that quality gap. And it was a big one, domestic makers routinely suffered twice the number of “problems” of the top foreign makers. Of course, even the imports had their issues back then, but as quality became a watchword, even the worst manufacturers suddenly started to make it a top priority, and, year-after-year, the defect count for the typical car rolling off the assembly line has steadily shrunk.
According to Power’s latest survey, the average buyer of a 2010 car, truck or crossover is experiencing about 1.08 problems during the first 90 days of ownership. More precisely, in the language of the Initial Quality Survey, there are an average of 108 “problems” per 100 vehicles.
The products produced by the worst manufacturer on the list, Land Rover, suffered 170 problems per 100, or 170 PP100 – less than two glitches for every vehicle. Put another way, that’s less than half what the best makers could deliver in the early years of the IQS. The best individual model, the Lexus LS, racked up just 55 PP100 on the latest study, which translates into just one complaint ticked off on the Power survey form by every other buyer.
Continue reading TheDetroitBureau.com on Autoblog with Paul Eisenstein
TheDetroitBureau.com on Autoblog with Paul Eisenstein originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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