TrueDelta

Earlier this week Chrysler talked about taking real steps to improve its quality. Today it’s GM. Mark Reuss, GM’s head of engineering, had this to say to the Detroit Free Press:

“Reliability has been the Achilles’ heel of GM for my entire career,” he said, promising he would focus the company’s engineers around the world on fixing the problem. “It gets down to an individual engineer’s ability to find a problem and leadership’s ability to fix it,” he said, adding that too many GM engineers have been reluctant to point out problems because they were afraid they’d get the blame rather than praise for catching the mistake before customers suffered.

It’s refrreshing to hear Reuss speaking so candidly. But such talk isn’t entirely new. Will the talk translate into action and results this time around? Unlike Chrysler, Reuss didn’t mention any concrete steps being taken to get there other than not firing people who bring up quality problems.

The reaction of some over at GMInsideNews: Reuss should be fired for mentioning GM’s quality problems.

Too many of GM’s recent launches have been rough. I see this in responses to TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey. For example, there seem to be some Lambda crossovers that are simply not fixable. On the other hand, the Malibu has been solid from the start.

TrueDelta’s results promptly update four times a year. So when GM does launch a solid product (or not), that information will often appear here first:

Car Reliability Survey results

According to today’s Detroit News, Chrysler is claiming that they will be a (though not “the”) quality leader by the end of 2012. They (and many other auto makers) have made similar claims before. Sometimes they achieve these goals. More often they don’t. Chrysler’s chances?

Chrysler is increasing its odds of success by making what appear to be substantial changes to its organization and culture. A new senior VP of quality has been hired away from Nissan (they’re a quality leader?). The quality organizatioin has been enlarged from 200 to 1,700 people. These people have been organized into cross-functional teams focused on the quick execution of needed changes. Perhaps the biggest change of all: Chrysler now claims that they will tackle problems rather than pretending they don’t exist or ignoring them and hoping they’ll go away. (Which has been proven to result in customers going away.)

Unknown: whether these people really have the pull to get their requested changes executed. Large organizations are chock full of special teams charged with getting something done, but without the pull to actually get it done. Is this one of those?

Chryler claims that engineering changes have already had a substantial impact on existing products. Supposedly, while 75 percent of defects were design-related last year, with the remaining 25 percent occurring during assembly, the ratio is now 50-50. If we assume that the number of assembly defects has not changed (which raises the question–why not, since its easier to quickly eliminate these?), this implies that the total number of defects has already been cut in half.

Too good to be true? Are these just rough, shoot-from-the-hip numbers? Perhaps, but if the head of quality is dishing out such numbers…not the most promising sign.

TrueDelta promptly updates its Car Reliability Survey results four times a year, not just once after a lengthy delay. So if Chrysler’s quality does improve, it will show up here first:

Car Reliability Survey results

I’ve long thought rust was a thing of the past. Rust prevention technology has gotten so good that I haven’t had a car with a rust problem since a decade-old 1985 Ford Escort. And even with the Escort rust wasn’t externally visible. I hardly ever see a car with visible rust around the Detroit suburbs, and those I do see are over a decade old.

Then a few months back I noticed that my 2003 Mazda Protege5 was rusting around the rear wheel openings and along the inside of the driver’s door, where the inner and outer panel are welded together.

Conducting the TrueDelta Car Reliability Survey, I’ve been receiving multiple reports of such rust with both the Protege and the Mazda3. As far as I can tell, neither model has sufficient rust protection for areas where the roads are salted. In some cases, rust has started within the warranty period.

People still remember how Hondas used to rust back in the 1970s and 1980s.

Now I’m wondering if Mazda’s rep is going to take a similar hit. Rust is worse than other problems–you can’t fix it merely by swapping out parts. It’s essentially cancer for cars. I’ve treated those areas I can get to, and repainted them. But this will probably be an annual procedure going forward. A shame, because these particular models are otherwise very durable.

The rust warranty lasts for five years–so it ended a year ago today for me. Called the dealer I bought the car from, and they essentially said I’m SOL. Especially since I haven’t been taking the car there for $30+ oil changes.

Which is about what I expected. Another thing I’ve learned by conducting this survey: with nearly all manufacturers, when the warranty is over, it’s over, even if an obvious engineering or manufacturing error is causing a widespread premature problem. You do get some chance of out-of-warranty assistance if you go to the dealer for all of your service–but I haven’t quite learned this lesson yet.

Would I have bought this car if I’d known it’d be rusting out within six years? As much as I like it, probably not.

Consumer Reports released their latest results today, based on a survey that went out last April. TrueDelta’s results are currently two months ahead of CR’s latest, and will soon be five months ahead.

Looking through the latest results, I see largely confirmation of some results we first released over a year ago, such as that for the Jaguar XF.

But I also see a couple of puzzling results. I thought CR had stopped reporting on models that were introduced around the time the survey went out, because owners haven’t had the cars long enough to provide reliable data. But they have a result for the 2010 Honda Insight. It’s much better than average–as expected for cars that were at best a few weeks old. This result appears to be correct based on our data, but this is largely dumb luck on their part.

CR also announced that the all-wheel-drive Chevrolet Traverse, GMC Acadia, and Buck Enclave “Lambda” crossovers have improved to “average,” and so can now be recommended. But not the front-wheel-drive versions–they remain “worse than average” so they are not recommended.

Now, it doesn’t make sense for one car with all the parts of another, but a few more, to be more reliable. My first thought: just another sign that their data are messy.

Then I dug deep into their results, and found a nice addition: they now state the percent difference from average. Still not an absolute repair frequency, but a step in the right direction.

FWD Lambdas: 21% worse than average

AWD Lambdas: 19% worse than average

“Average” runs from 19% below the average to 19% above the average, so the AWD crossovers just barely make the cut, while the FWDs just barely miss it.

In reality, there’s no meaningful difference between the two. But the way CR hides the facts behind its dots and recommendations will lead some people to spend the extra money for all-wheel-drive.

Recently, whenever Toyota has a quality issue Automotive News likes to suggest that this might severely damage their reputation.

The latest case: Toyota is recalling 3.6 million cars because the floormats might slide forward and snag the accelerator. Cases of “unintended acceleration” have caused some accidents and even a few deaths, so they can be very serious.

If the recall fixes the problem, it won’t have a lingering impact. If it doesn’t…ask Audi.

At any rate, this is a safety problem, not a quality problem. Toyota’s quality reputation won’t be significantly harmed by stories in the press all by themselves. Instead, reputations for reliability (or lack thereof) begin with the experiences of people and their close friends and family. As long as many car owners aren’t having bad experiences with Toyota’s cars, their reputation for building reliable cars is safe.

It would help if Toyota went out of its way to take care of those people who do have problems with its cars. Unfortunately, what I’m hearing from Toyota owners suggests that their customer care is, if anything, worse than average.

On a positive note, Toyota has announced that it will soon offer extended warranties up to eight years or 125,000 miles, whichever comes first. Manufacturers’ extended warranties usually go up to 7/100. A willingness to go up to 8/125 with an extended warranty suggests that the cars are now being engineered to go this long without a major problem. Only Honda, which offers an 8/120 extended warranty, offers a warranty nearly this long.

Toyota’s move is consistent with car buyers’ expectations. Another thing I’ve learned from talking with hundreds of car owners: people increasingly expect a car to last at least 120,000 miles without major problems. Getting to 100,000 is no longer sufficient.

We’ve updated the Car Reliability Survey results to include owner experiences through June 2009. With this update, our results are about 14 months ahead of the traditional source of such information.

Prompt quarterly updates enable TrueDelta to provide initial reliability stats on new models quickly. The August results included the first 2010 model, the Kia Soul. (A big thanks to Kia Soul Forums for helping to get the word out.) Launching an all-new model can be tricky, but so far it appears that Kia has done well with this one. Through the end of June only one of the 38 participating owners had had a repair, to the satellite radio. This works out to 15 successful repair trips per 100 cars per year.

When the stat is updated again in November, it will probably be a bit higher. For July some owners reported repairs to the optional lights on the speakers that beat in time with the music. Kia is aware of this problem, and has issued a TSB for it, so it should only affect early cars.

The November update will include additional 2010s such as the redesigned Mazda3 and Toyota Prius.

A new blog for the Land Rover Freelander charges that it’s not fair to rate the Freelander’s reliability using the same scale for all cars. The two reasons given: luxury car buyers are pickier, and luxury cars have more features.

It might or might not be true that luxury car buyers are pickier. Many people have suggested this, but I’ve never seen any data on it. One thing TrueDelta does to reduce the impact of the pickiness factor: we measure the number of successful repair trips, not the number of perceived problems.

It is certainly true that luxury cars include more parts that can break. But also note that here we report the actual repair frequencies, and not just “better than average” or “worse than average.” If a luxury model requires more repairs because it has more things that can break, then that’s just the facts. People want to know how often a model is likely to require repairs, not some stat adjusted for the number of things that can break.

The larger problem with the post: people aren’t usually going to compare the scores for a Land Rover to those of a Honda, then opt for the Honda. Instead, people considering a Land Rover are likely to compare its scores to those for competing luxury models.

Which brings us to the outright error in the post. It asserts that “other luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, and even Lexus also get a bad rap.” Sorry, but this just isn’t true. I’ve never seen a reliability stat for Rolls-Royce, so it seems that the author wasn’t looking at actual results when writing the post. Yet more evidence of this: unlike the larger LR3, the LR2 (Freelander2 in the UK) actually has a fairly low reported repair frequency in TrueDelta’s results. Then there’s Lexus. The great majority of Lexus models have received above average reliability scores, even when measured on the same scale as Civics and Corollas. It is more difficult to achieve top scores with a luxury model, but it is nevertheless possible.

I keep reading over and over, most recently in today’s Automotive News, that GM needs to tell the American public that it “is not the company that screwed them in 1978.” The claim: the cars that turned millions of people away from GM were decades ago, and that GM is unfairly being punished for the sins of long-retired executives and employees.

As much as I’d like to see GM recover, this annoys me. I tend to get annoyed when people try to make something true by repeating it over and over. They read it somewhere, so it must be true, right?

The reality: GM’s cars are much better than they were, but they often aren’t as good as they should be. Based on responses to TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey, the oft-mentioned 2008 Chevrolet Malibu was the exception, not the rule, among GM’s recent new product launches. The 2007 Aura, the 2007 Lambdas, the 2008 VUE, and the 2008 CTS all launched with two to three times the average repair frequency.

This said, an extra problem or two in the first year or three isn’t what scares away potential buyers. Based on the emails I receive, many people want to know how a car will hold up for years after the warranty ends. So neither IQS nor VDS is going to carry much weight with them.

In the long-term, if GM’s cars hold up then its reputation will improve. But this could take a decade or more.

In the interim, GM needs to more firmly and comprehensively stand behind its products, to remove risk from buyers’ minds. As I’ve suggested before, they could do this by stating that they’ll cover the cost of any common problem for the first 100,000 or even 120,000 miles. The “old GM” wasn’t just a matter of the number of problems the cars had. How the company treated owners with car problems was at least as significant. Currently customer assistance is provided out of warranty on a seemingly arbitrary case-by-case basis. This does nothing to instill potential buyers with confidence in the company.

GM isn’t unusual in this regard–this sort of “customer care” is the industry norm. But GM needs buyers more than other car companies do. If GM truly is a different company now, providing clearly defined, comprehensive customer care would be a good way to prove this to the car buying public. Talk alone shouldn’t be sufficiently convincing, and probably won’t be.

GM is asking car buyers to wager that its quality has improved. But is GM willing to put its (U.S. government-provided) money where its mouth is, and bet on itself?

“Prius headlamp troubles could dim Toyota brand’s reputation,” writes Jean Halliday in today’s Advertising Age and Automotive News. I’ve suggested that manufacturers pick up the cost of common problems out of warranty. That said, this story seems driven more by an agenda than by the facts.

The issue: the optional HID headlights of the circa-2006 Prius are prone to turning off at random times, usually not at the same time. When this happens, they must be turned off, then on again. To fix the problem, Toyota dealers sometimes recommend replacing the entire HID system, at a cost of $1,700. Owners are launching a class action suit to force Toyota to cover these failures out of warranty.

I checked responses to TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey for any additional information they might provide. Quite a few owners have reported this problem, yet the Prius still has among the lowest repair frequencies. In all but one case, replacing the bulb seems to fix the problem. Non-OEM bulbs can be purchased on eBay for $90 per pair.

So why do we have an article in Automotive News? Many car models suffer from common problems, and there are plenty of class action lawsuits begging for coverage. Yet I cannot remember the last time AN covered such a problem.

And if they’re going to pick one common car problem to cover, why this one? These headlight failures don’t appear to have left anyone stranded, much less caused an accident. While dealers might try to charge $1,700, it is possible to fix the problem for as little as $90.

The allure appears to be Toyota’s quality reputation, and the widespread desire to take them down a notch or two. A quick read of the comments suggests that some people would like to use this problem as evidence that Toyota’s quality is no better than anyone else’s.

Should Toyota pick up the cost of replacement bulbs? Yes, if they’re smart. The biggest story here is that they didn’t respond more quickly–a sign that their customer care needs improvement. The facts do not support the extent to which AN calls Toyota reputation into question, much less singling them out for this treatment.

I strive to remain objective about how different manufacturers compare, and even to give them all the benefit of the doubt. Problem is, ownership of a 2002 Chrysler PT Cruiser (my wife’s car, she wanted something cute and fun) can make this very difficult. A conversation today with a dealership service writer was only the latest incident.

Some background: back in the fall of 2006 we had to replace the wheels on the PT Cruiser because, at 3.5 years of age, the original ones had corroded so badly around the valve stem seats that the tires were losing over ten pounds of pressure per day. Chrysler picked up half of the tab. They felt they were being gracious in doing so. After all, the wheels were six months out of warranty.

I’d never before heard of wheels corroding so badly that the tires wouldn’t hold air. So TrueDelta conducted a special survey on alloy wheel and chrome wheel corrosion. It turned out that while this problem was most common with Chryslers, it wasn’t uncommon with many other makes.

I heard from a few other owners of the same special edition of the PT Cruiser. It seems likely that the failure rate is close to 100 percent for cars in places where the roads are salted in the winter. Just a few months ago, I came across the following on Honest John’s, a UK car site: “Chromed alloys corrode and lose tyre pressure. Are unrepairable and a new set is £2,000, so best to switch to aftermarket wheels.” Wish we had, but Chrysler’s “customer care” assistance was predicated on buying the replacement wheels from Chrysler.

A few months after the wheels were replaced, the torque converter failed at 52,000 miles. This time they picked up nothing. We’d used up our “goodwill” with the wheels–one payment per customer.

We’ve had a few other repairs since then: brake calipers, control arm bushings, wheel bearings, the horn, and the thermostat housing (cracked). Today we had the outer tie-rod ends replaced. We’ve learned that a repair every eight months or so feels like “in the shop all the time.”

But what really concerns me: the finish is starting to flake off the replacement wheels, which are about 2.5 years old. Seems the replacement wheels were no better than the originals. We’ve had this problem once. We shouldn’t have to deal with it again.

So I called the dealer, which is located just a few miles from Chrysler’s HQ. Turns out that they’re not happy that I haven’t had my car serviced there since the awful experience getting the first set of wheels replaced (tires still at 10 psi after paying to have the wheels “inspected,” lug nuts overtorqued so badly AAA almost couldn’t get them off).

The service writer’s final response before hanging up on me: “You’re the one who bought a PT Cruiser, not me. You get what you deserve when you do that.”

The final words I squeezed in before the click: “I can’t believe you just said that.”

I’ll call Chrysler Customer Care on Monday, to see if there’s anything they care to do about the wheels. Probably not.

Conducting TrueDelta’s research, I hear of quite a few such horror stories, with many different brands. Honda might be a bit better than most. Toyota certainly isn’t. In general, the only way to avoid such “customer care” is to not have problems in the first place.

I’m still waiting to learn of a company that truly stands behind its products by consistently taking care of common problems caused by engineering errors even after the warranty ends. If GM and Ford want to live, this is the #1 thing I would suggest that they do. For what such a strategy would look like, read this blog entry from November 2007. Chrysler? They’re most likely too far gone.