Originally Posted by BMWTurboDzl
Originally Posted by supton
I'm more curious about what is more reliable and affordable outside of warranty--AFAIK vehicles have lower TCO if driven long past warranty so as to drive cost per mile down. But then you worry about when costs will go through the roof as MTBF on every system and component is reached.
What I find so frustrating is that you can't really find any data on long-term (i.e. 5 yrs+) ownership. There is a group in Germany (maybe TUV) which literally disassembles vehicles with about 50k miles on them but of course a majority of those vehicles aren't sold in the US.
If you look ad the JD Power VDS (3 yr) study I posted you'll see VW/Hyundai ranked above and sometimes well above Honda, Nissan, Mazda, as well as a bunch of the domestics yet owners of these brands claim their vehicles have been very reliable post warranty.
Personally, I don't believe ANYTHING that JD Power says and I don't give ANY additional consideration to products that use their "awards" in their advertising.
Corporations hire them for advertising purposes, so they work for those corporations, and they issue bogus "awards" for whatever makes that corporation's products look better than the competition's products. Statistics can be manipulated to make anything look better or worse than it actually is, especially when there is a profit motive. For example, they have issued "reliability" awards for virtually every Chevy product for the last 5 years (which we all know is bogus) and Chevy has been using this in virtually every add for at least the last couple of years.
What DOES sway me are ratings/rankings based on INDEPENDENT not for profit scientific surveys like what Consumer Reports and dashboard-light does. CR only goes back 6 years but dashboard-light goes back 25 years and their ratings are weighted by age and miles (http://www.dashboard-light.com/how-we-figure-out-the-score/) which is how Hummer and SAAB land so high in their manufacturer ratings (http://www.dashboard-light.com/vehicles/Resources/Images/QIRAlpha.png), neither one of them would be rated as high without the weighting.
Originally Posted by supton
I'm more curious about what is more reliable and affordable outside of warranty--AFAIK vehicles have lower TCO if driven long past warranty so as to drive cost per mile down. But then you worry about when costs will go through the roof as MTBF on every system and component is reached.
What I find so frustrating is that you can't really find any data on long-term (i.e. 5 yrs+) ownership. There is a group in Germany (maybe TUV) which literally disassembles vehicles with about 50k miles on them but of course a majority of those vehicles aren't sold in the US.
If you look ad the JD Power VDS (3 yr) study I posted you'll see VW/Hyundai ranked above and sometimes well above Honda, Nissan, Mazda, as well as a bunch of the domestics yet owners of these brands claim their vehicles have been very reliable post warranty.
Personally, I don't believe ANYTHING that JD Power says and I don't give ANY additional consideration to products that use their "awards" in their advertising.
Corporations hire them for advertising purposes, so they work for those corporations, and they issue bogus "awards" for whatever makes that corporation's products look better than the competition's products. Statistics can be manipulated to make anything look better or worse than it actually is, especially when there is a profit motive. For example, they have issued "reliability" awards for virtually every Chevy product for the last 5 years (which we all know is bogus) and Chevy has been using this in virtually every add for at least the last couple of years.
What DOES sway me are ratings/rankings based on INDEPENDENT not for profit scientific surveys like what Consumer Reports and dashboard-light does. CR only goes back 6 years but dashboard-light goes back 25 years and their ratings are weighted by age and miles (http://www.dashboard-light.com/how-we-figure-out-the-score/) which is how Hummer and SAAB land so high in their manufacturer ratings (http://www.dashboard-light.com/vehicles/Resources/Images/QIRAlpha.png), neither one of them would be rated as high without the weighting.