Archive for February, 2007

TrueDelta doesn’t gather its data from a random sample of vehicle owners. Worse, many people join TrueDelta after reading about it on a forum, and many people only visit automotive forums when they have a problem with their car. For these two reasons, I’m often asked “Don’t you think your research is going to be very biased?.

The short answer: no

Maybe you were hoping for a lengthier answer? Then you’ve come to the right place. 

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Car and Driver has been conducting events for automakers for a few years. At these events, a few hundred people drive the client’s car and those of its competitors, then declare the client’s car the winner and praise it lavishly. Now Automotive News reports in this week’s issue that both Car and Driver and sister publication Road & Track will create video versions of their reviews–for manufacturers willing to pay a fee.

The magazines continue to claim a strict separation between editorial and advertising, and that they’d never say anything that wasn’t true. The actual words of the publisher: “If the editorial staff has said that the vehicle is overweight, we’ll never say it’s light. We’ll focus on other aspects of the vehicle on behalf of the consumer.” In other words, just give the client a good edit, and talk only about the strengths of the client’s car.

But with more and more riding on a positive review, how much pressure will reviewers feel to write positive reviews? I’m glad I’m not in their shoes.

Panel members received a sneak preview of the latest Vehicle Reliabiity Survey results last week, and these can now be reached from the home page. While going over the data, a few things struck me as notable. Among them, the Ford’s large sedan and crossover / wagon appear to have improved greatly from their first year to their second.

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I’ve been charged a few times with being biased against domestic cars simply based on the cars depicted in the header: an Acura TL, a Kia Sportage, and a Honda Odyssey. I suppose an explanation of how these cars were selected is long overdue.

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Time and time again, most recently in this thread over at VWVortex, I’ve come across the claim that caring properly for a car makes all the difference. Care for a car, and it’ll be reliable. Don’t care for it, and it won’t be.

While there’s some truth to this, it’s far from the whole truth.

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Earlier this month I posted that GM wants to make my life harder by having incentives that change every two weeks rather than monthly or quarterly (which is the norm).

Most recently, they ran a one-week “Presidents Day Sale.” Which was supposed to end on the 20th. So the night of the 20th I removed the Presidents Day deals from my site. But now they’ve been extended — “but only ’til February 28th!”

Yeah, and the sale at my local low-end furniture store is also “for one week only.” Every week.

To me, hybrids make intuitive sense. Why not recover some of the energy that will otherwise be converted to heat by the brakes?

But some people hate hybrids. And for them CNW’s ‘Dust to Dust Automotive Energy Report’ has been a godsend. It claims that once you consider all of the energy costs that go into a vehicle, from development through manufacture, ownership, and disposal, that hybrids cost far more than ordinary cars. Compared to the Prius, a hyper-pricey, gas-swilling Porsche Cayenne is allegedly less wasteful.

I haven’t written a critique of this study, because the findings are so obviously off-base that it didn’t seem worth the time and energy. But it keeps getting cited, most recently by an otherwise excellent blog I just stumbled across, A Car is Not a Refrigerator.  

So it seems a critique is necessary after all.

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A month or so ago extended warranty provider Warranty Direct released claim rates by manufacturer. Since it was largely (or even entirely) based on UK policies, this study only received attention across the water. Then, yesterday, Mazda USA decided to tout its top ranking. And I’m being asked what I think of these results.

On the face of it, an extended warranty company should be a great source of reliability info. After people who might neglect to report a problem on a survey like TrueDelta’s are going to report it to the extended warranty company so they won’t have to pay for the repair.

Problem is, Warranty Direct has performed an especially shoddy analysis.

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Pontiac bought an island to display and sell cars in the virtual world of Second Life. Fellow island-owner Scion recently held the first simultaneous real word / virtual world press conference to introduce two new models. While the Mark Templin with a pulse gave a speech in front of me, his avatar gave an identical speech in Second Life. To an audience composed of virtual Scion owners’ avatars. Now eMercedesBenz.com informs me that Mercedes-Benz has also set up a dealership in that expansive corner of cyberspace.

All of which leads me to the obvious question: since Second Life is so eager to emulate real life, do the cars there also break down? Does this Merecedes-Benz dealership have service bays? Do I need to start recruiting a virtual panel from among the three million residents of Second Life?

Perhaps. But not soon. I’m far too busy in my first life.

For years enthusiasts have asked GM to offer its European cars in the U.S. (An Opel Omega rebadged as a Cadillac Catera didn’t count.) This fall they’ll start to get their wish, when the Opel Astra goes on sale as the Saturn Astra, with more German-engineered Opels rebadged as Saturns to follow.

I fear that the Astra will not sell as well as many people expect, for one reason: the engine. (more…)