Is there a reliablity problem with the Hemi?

I did not change my opinion at all. I still think the Avalon sucks and the

300M is a better car. However if one compares newsgroup posts, Chryslers have more problems posted than Toyotas.

Asuuming for a moment that this is a given there's many compelling explanations of why your seeing this. One obvious one is that when foreign makes fail, the cost to repair is a lot higher, as a result most foreign cars are going to go permanently out of service as soon as anything serious happens. by contrast domestics are going to go through a number of repair sessions since the repair costs are lower.

What is really needed, and this would make a damn good thesis, is for some enterprising graduate student to run a study of perhaps 4-5 average wrecking yards and for all vehicles that come into the yard that come into it not because of wrecks but because they have stopped running and they aren't worth repairing any longer, to survey the make and model and odometer reading. Then they could put that data into a model along with the initial sale price of the vehicle, and figure out what the real TCO is for foreign vs domestic cars. The same thing could be done with surveys of towed abandonded vehicles.

Grad students write thesis of garbage analysis all the time, this isn't any different, except that it would actually produce data people would want to read, as opposed to useless trivia like the percentage of banannas that go bad and get tossed instead of being eaten.

Ted