Quote:
Originally Posted by wtwo3
Quote:
Originally Posted by speedyman
Read the fine print under any of these charts, graphs, whatever, and see that they release themselves from any accuracy or statistical significance. This stuff is a bunch of BS. "Initial quality", what the hell is that?
One brand is in first place and a year later they are way down the list in 17th along with many other brands showing wild changes in their so called "rankings".
This stuff always reminds me of the knuckle heads who believe everything they hear on the news.
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That's true... but I guess you look for trends year over year. It's never good to look at 1 or 2 years in a vacuum - especially since it seems JD Power doesn't seem to massage their data for outliers or provide much context behind what may be driving some of the changes. Sounds like they could use some data scientists on their team....
Looking through the dependability studies (I agree I'm not sure what "initial quality" means... but at least vehicle dependability offers some merit) from 2015 to 2021, you can see a few trends:
- Land Rover consistently ranks at the bottom
- Lexus and Porsche consistently rank at or near the top
- Honda has been steadily declining in reliability, but not quite as significantly as their decline in rankings (which suggests other brands are getting more reliable while Honda is not)
- BMW has consistently been above industry average, but never near the top
Ultimately I'm just speculating - but I wish there was a way to capture more nuanced data. Things like, categorizing the types/magnitude of problems - most common issues. For example, Brand A might be more reliable than Brand B based on JD Power's qualifications of # of issues per 100 vehicles. However looking deeper into the types of problems, Brand A experiences catastrophic powertrain failure while Brand B's more frequent issues happen to be things like the sunroof rattling or not working.
I know Consumer Reports provides some of that, but there should be a way to use the types of problems being experienced to weight the rankings as opposed to a straight count of problems. |
JD Power initial quality is based off the first 3 months of ownership. It is a useless metric of actual vehicle quality.