If God have intended for JD Powers or Consumer Reports to think for you, he wouldn't have given you a brain. All cars built today are pretty much equal, and have been for a long time. Continue to buy your Japanese products, I'll buy my American, which for some reason, does not break down nor get recalled at nearly the rate as these "perfect" Toyotas do. (BTW, is it my opinion, or does EVERY NEW GENERATION Camary look more ugly than the one before it?)
It's just that some are more equal than others...
Neither JD Power not CR constitute thought. They are information, data if you will. Thought is the brain's process for interpreting data.
Just as you shouldn't confuse data with thought, you shouldn't confuse unsupported assertions with data. CR data shows that there are big differences in reliability among the cars on the market.
Unfortunately, CR changed their reporting a couple years ago and it is now harder to determine exactly what the failure rates are. One assumes they are not much different from what they were before the change. Some domestic and German 5-7 year-old cars have 5 or 6 problem areas where failure rates exceed 10% or even 15% per year, not to mention less than stellar rates in the other areas. There are some domestics with reliability records which are not terrible and some are equal to the second tier Japanese manufacturers. 5-7 year-old Toyotas and Hondas seldom have any area with worse than 5% failure rate. and many areas have less than 2% failures. With 14 different systems, and a few years of ownership, this difference really adds up.
Yeah, I continually buy one every eleven or twelve years.
This is what is known as the straw man argument. No one claims that Toyotas or Hondas are perfect.
Yes, it is your opinion. A fact would be that every generation sells better than the one before it.
Hmmm. Recall rate... I have an 06 Si. No recalls yet, and not a single service visit. I've never had an American car with that kind of reliabilty. A few oil changes in 20,000 miles, and a tire rotation.
Yep, that damned Japanese reliability just sucks...
On Jun 10, 9:16 pm, ACAR wrote:
I think it is enlightening to realize that the Big Three designed their cars to need repair frequently from the very beginning, while the Japanese had the exact opposite approach and designed their cars for durabililty from the very beginning. Hence the vast difference in quality between the two. In recent years, this gap has indeed dwindled for two reasons: the Americans have been forced by economics of sale to improve quality, and the Japanese have taken on some of the American way of thinking and have begun designing some of their components to fail after a predetermined length of time or duration of use. This allows future revenue in repairs and service. One example: Honda designed their Odyssey with a condensor without any protection from chips or stones from the road and has gotten back a huge windfall with the repairs, but the rest of the vehicle is absolutely top-notch. Another example: GM changed their horrible minivan and small truck vehicle platform to a new one as seen in the Envoy and Canyon etc... which is of top-notch quality and durability but it took them so many years because they were reaping huge windfalls from the downstream repairs of the old units. So, in a nutshell, Mike is partly right and partly wrong. I buy Hondas because I like the chassis designs and of course the engine reliability is legendary. But so are the Toyotas, but I don't buy them because I think they are plain ugly, the whole line of them from the Corolla to the Tundra.
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