12th Mar 2009, 19:34
Very good comment. No source that I have read that deals with automotive news says Toyota is better overall than Ford in RELIABILITY. Just the contrary. Yes, you can find magazines and other sources that refer to domestic vehicles as "less sophisticated". People somehow interpret that as "less reliable". Definitely not so. "Sophisticated" means more gadgets and more opportunities for malfunctions. An excellent example of this is BMW's horribly complicated "I-Drive" system. A USA Today reviewer said in his review a couple of years ago that it would probably relegate this "sophisticated" car that ALL the car magazines love to the "Used cars to avoid list".
Another point: Both Mercedes and BMW are touted as "sophisticated, refined and benchmarks of quality". If you check their actual RELIABILITY ratings, many models are worse than the very worst of Fords. When car magazines spend their couple of hours with a vehicle they are impressed with only two things: will it do 0-60 in under 5 seconds, and how many little nifty buttons it has for electronic gadgetry. They actually care very little about ride (anything comfortable is called "sloppy handling") and there is NO WAY they can remotely make ANY decisions about reliability. I also feel there is a VERY strong built-in bias against anything made by the U.S. on the part of ALL automotive magazines. One has to be careful in how they read too much into a glowing review of a car that indicates NOTHING about how LONG the car will run.
Comment 11:18 makes a very good point as well. We have also owned numerous cars that had "worse than average" or "much worse than average" reliability ratings. Not a one of them ever had a single mechanical problem. I can't say it is because we took better care of them either. We took exactly the same care of our imports and they were all lemons.
12th Mar 2009, 15:00
I've posted about this before. The curious thing is that Consumer Affairs is so different from sites and sources that do actual surveys. It's interesting that they accept advertising. It's notable that it isn't a scientific survey but rather replaces all of the controls imposed by an attempt at impartiality with anecdote -- which is fine, but it tells you nothing about what percentage of vehicles are having a given problem. It's also odd that there is so few complaints about other vehicles... some have had quite a few issues of their own, yet there is very little commentary about them. The site also refers to the Tundra as ugly -- an odd pejorative for a site claiming independence.
Lastly it has a strong emphasis on litigation -- that's part of the reason they present for pressing the "complaint button". I pressed the button to see what info they might want and found that there was no info that could be used to check if an individual actually owned the vehicle at all (like registration #). All of these things can skew results.
That doesn't make them wrong. Or biased. But it should lead you to question what's up.