TrueDelta

They automotive press is increasingly fond of claiming that Toyota is going down the same path GM went down. But words are cheap.

Did Toyota overexpand their production capacity just in time for a severe market downturn? Absolutely. But a single major strategic miscue does not inevitably lead to long-term decline.

The real thing to pay attention to is not Toyota’s current profitability, but how they react to their problems.

First off, do they react to problems by claiming that they aren’t really problems, or by attempting to fix them? GM has for decades tended to opt for the former. Toyota, in contrast, readily admitted that it had made some mistakes and that it needed to fix these ASAP.

Second, if a solution doesn’t work, do they give up, or make another attempt? GM, time and time again, has poured billions of dollars into “breakthrough” solutions, only to ball them up (or let them die on the vine) when these solutions don’t initially succeed. Toyota, in contrast, has a record of trying over and over. They’re on their third Lexus GS, for example. Keep at it, and they’ll eventually have one that wins over BMW owners.

The key isn’t avoiding mistakes, but learning from mistakes, and not giving up. So far, Toyota seems to still be learning, and persisting. So I do not believe it will go down GM’s path.

Back in September 2008 I suggested how gas mileage should be calculated for range-extended electric vehicles like the upcoming Chevrolet Volt: one set of numbers for electric use, and a second set for after the batteries have discharged. General Motors, of course, saw things differently. It wanted the highest possible numbers, both for CAFE and for advertising purposes. And it appears that GM has gotten its way, as the EPA city rating for the Volt will be 230 MPG.

How is this possible? Through a test that makes almost no use of the gasoline engine. Problem is, this figure doesn’t remotely represent the full cost of operating the vehicle.

In a way, though, such a high number will be less misleading. General Motors has so overshot the mark in lobbying for the highest possible number that even the most clueless person will know it’s BS. If they’d finagled a number in the 80 to 100 range then perhaps the average person might have been misled into thinking it was real. But not now.

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.

The survey covering June ended today. July was not an easy month. The response rate was running two to three percent below the norm for much of the month. Not good, as this would have nearly cancelled out all of the people who joined in the last three months. And I’m not much for running unless it gets me somewhere.

Then, toward the end of the month, we ran a special email asking members why they hadn’t responded.

The #1 reason: the car had been sold. And so we learned that we need a more obvious way for people to report when they buy and sell cars.

Thanks largely to that email, we ended the month with over 12,000 responses, and a response rate a few tenths above the norm. Quite a comeback.

The payoff: 257 full results, and another 249 partial results, in mid-August. Including the first for a 2010 model.

Ten other models fell a single response short of the minimum. A late response might still tip them in.

Results won’t be out before mid-August because I’ve still got a lot of data to clean. When that’s done, July will finally be over. And we can then start looking forward to October…