Re: Consumer Re****ts reliability survey for Cars

On 23 Jul 2008 11:45:52 -0400, kludge@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

>Built_Well  <Built_Well_Toyota@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>Damn, everytime I think of expanding my horizons beyond
>>Toyota, cold, hard survey data and results bring me back,
>>keeping me loyal to Toyota.
>
>Not that Toyota products are bad in any way, but this survey is pretty
>much useless because it considers all reliability issues to be the same.
>A car with a lot of warranty tickets on broken glove box hinges and a
>car with a lot of warranty tickets on blown engines are considered the
>same way.
>
>Some of the surveys that have done breakdowns on individual issues bring
>some really interesting stuff up.  For example, there are a whole lot of
>repair tickets opened up on BMW's iDrive system, which are related to the
>system having horrible user interface design rather than actually being
>unreliable.  People can't get it work right, not because it's actually
broken
>but because it's difficult to use.  These sorts of things should not be
>considered if you are actually trying to measure reliability, although
they
>do belong in an overall survey of customer satisfaction.
>--scott


The other problems with most of these surveys is that they express
"problems per hundred".  That makes trivial differences seem like
significant differences.  How does 150 problems versus 200 problems
per year sound??  Pretty bad.  But how does 1.5 problem versus 2
problems per year sound?  Trivial doesn't it.  Yet that's all the
difference there is between the upper half or so of these cars. Should
you make your buying decision on whether you'll have 1.5 instead of 2
problems a year fixed under warranty???????