It rates reliability over 3 years, meaning this rates 2003 model vehicles. Industry average is 227 probs per 100. Hyundai is 253, well below average. Hyundai has only one car in the top 3 rankings, in the subcompact category. That's because in 2003, there are ONLY 3 subcompacts on the market.
So despite Hyundai's good showings of some models in the JD Power initial quality surveys (2003 Sonata was 2nd in its class) and the Consumer Reports surveys, the company as a whole does lousy here. Why? Discuss.
If you look at the data this way, the Initial Quality Survey did a remarkable job forecasting the Vehicle Dependability Survey:
2003 Hyundai Initial Qual Survey 152
2003 Industry Average IQS 133
2006 Hyundai Veh Dep Survey 2003 models 253
2006 Industry Average VDS 2003 models 227
Now look at this year's IQS
2006 Hyundai IQS 102
2006 Industry Average IQS 124
Clearly a significant improvement for Hyundai. If the pattern holds we can expect the 2006 models to do very well in the 2009 VDS survey.
Your words are so in comflict with the data it could be considered funny, or someone trying to spin the facts.
"..well below average.." If you consider that if you owned a Hyundai you likely had between 2 and 3 problems in three years, 2.53. Just like the industry average, between 2 and 3 problems 2.27. Or your Hyundai had an 11% chance of having one more problem than the average. Not exactly well below average given that this was a consumer survey and the demographic differences in the groups of people who buy different new vehicles makes for a large error. I think it is plus or minus 3 to 6% for a survey like this. "Well Below" is a subjective term, but it has long been considered that it takes a 25% difference to be considered well below on these types of surveys.
"..the company as a whole does lousy here. WHY?" You say they do lousy here, but yet they did better here than the initial quality study. The initial quality study was 14% below industry average, the 3 year study was only 11% below industry average. This just flies against common sense saying that they did lousy here, referring to the initial quality survey where the results showed them slightly further below average.
It is still deceptive for JDPowers to call this a vehicle dependability study. Dependability in peoples minds means that the car had a problem and wouldn't get them from point A to B. In the study though they are rating number of problems that required an unscheduled trip for service. Most problems in cars today are quality problems, not dependability issues. The study should be called the 3 year vehicle quality survey.
If they don't tell what the problems are then one cannot judge the usefullness of the report. I have no faith in Consumer Reports because the criteria I have seen them use is often not relevant to my decision making. I expect JD Powers has the same problem - a fixation on numbers with little correlation between volume of complaints and the severity of the problems.
I will second that. I lost all faith in ConRep after receiving one of their vehicle surveys (I was subscribing at the time) and despite having a couple of serious problems with the vehicle in question, there was no clear category in which to place the issues. Some of them had no place at all to address them. Thus, a serious issue in one area may be diluted across a couple of categories and, instead of drawing a poor mark, only show up as an average mark.
Well, that coupled with a couple of specific instances where I made appliance purchases based on their ratings and ended up with a sub-par product that was a huge disappointment.
In addition, I read their "reviews" and "ratings" on items about which I had a great deal of familiarity and found time and again that they missed the mark by a large margin (especially in the areas of high-tech/computer-related items).
To be precise I would have to dig back in my records (it was a number of years ago now), but I distinctly recall 3 separate types of issues, I believe one was a cooling issue which involved electrical components in the cooling system (maybe fan). Basically, the survey categories were not a) Complete b) Orthogonal It was quite frustrating and eyeopening at the same time.
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