5th Mar 2009, 20:19
This is typical of the brainwashing job Japanese companies have done on our media. Only recently has ANYONE really bothered to see if these supposedly "superior" vehicles are all they have been (erroneously) portrayed to be. It turns out that not only are Toyota and Honda (and Nissan) building much lower quality and more unreliable vehicles, but domestics (Ford especially) are literally running rings around all of them in quality, reliability and performance. Any time ANY American automotive publication publishes ANYTHING remotely complimentary about a domestic vehicle, you know that the real truth is that the vehicles are really about TWICE as good as the media outlets claim.
Even when Honda was replacing transmissions at 30,000 miles in many of its vehicles Car and Driver was STILL fawning over them and ignoring the problems. Motor Trend hastily jumped to name the 2007 Camry "Car of the Year" just because Toyota FINALLY had built a V-6 engine for it that could actually do 0-60 in UNDER 10 seconds. They never bothered to look into the dozens of issues Toyota was having at the time with reliability problems.
5th Mar 2009, 15:18
Thankfully they also stopped recommending new models on the previous model's reliability as well. That reflects well on them too.
My biggest single problem with their data handling is that the final symbol given is based on much below average through much better than average without ever telling us what average is. For all we know the very worst to the very best is an insignificant margin. Maybe the very worst are still extremely good. We should be made more aware. Truedelta helps in that regard.