Archive for February, 2010

Early this morning the 60,000th car was enrolled in the Car Reliability Survey. It had been only 13 days since the 59,000th was enrolled, a new record.

We currently have just over 49,300 members, so some time in March we’ll grow past the 50,000 mark.

With the number of participants growing so quickly, the May results will be the most comprehensive yet.

Consumer Reports announced its Annual Auto Issue today. As in past years, the press treats the reliability ratings in it as news, even though they’re the same ratings that have been around since the New Car Preview reached newsstands last October. And are based on a survey that was sent out nearly a year ago, in April 2009.

For some reason, no one ever mentions this. Certainly not CR. But not the media, either.

So we get forum posts like this one. It’s easy to understand why people, hearing there’s a new Auto Issue, think that the results in it are new. It’s just not remotely accurate.

TrueDelta recently updated its reliability stats to include owner experiences through the end of 2009. So they’re based on data that is over eight months ahead of CR’s.

When shopping for a car, do you want to know how it was faring a year ago, when it was a year younger, or how it’s been doing lately?

Car Reliability Survey results

We’ve updated the Car Reliability Survey results to include owner experiences through December 31, 2009.

The new email process, which reduced the number of emails to members whose responses were up-to-date, was a big success. For the past year the response rate has been about 36 percent. This time around it was 38 percent. In absolute terms, we received responses for over 15,400 cars, up from 13,140 three months ago.

This was enough to provide full reliability stats for 355 car models, compared to 295 three month ago, and partial results for another 291. Coverage for the “odds” stats increased from 99 to 125.

I’ll cover some notable results in future blog entries.

A big thank you to everyone who helped make these results possible. The more owners participate, the more information we can provide.

Okay, I’ve been busy, and my NAIAS coverage has been the most drawn out on the entire Internet.

I’ve made it to F.

Ford announced that the 2011 Mustang will be offered with two new DOHC engines that promise to cause major headaches for the Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger, a 305-horsepower 3.7-liter V6 and a 412-horsepower 5.0-liter V8. Yes, the 5.0 badges will be back. By nearly all accounts the 2010 Mustang already outhandles its primary competitors. Add nearly 100 horsepower to both of its volume engines, and it’ll run away from them in a straight line as well.

Oddly, I’m more interested in driving Ford’s main auto show debut, the 2012 Focus. The Focus was popular with enthusiasts in SVT form from 2002 through 2004. Then Ford steadily drained all fun from the car with the 2005 refresh and the roundly panned 2008 redesign.

For 2012, we’ll once again be getting the same Focus Europe gets. The exterior design is a little busy, but much more stylish than Chevrolet’s upcoming Cruze and better proportioned than the smaller 2011 Ford Fiesta. Inside, you’ll find a very European interior with comfortable, supportive seats front and rear. Ford knows how to make a car handle well when they want to. The main question in my mind: will the new 155-horsepower 2.0-liter direct-injected four-cylinder engine be as good as the rest of the car? A sport model with a more powerful engine is likely.

Based on the emails I’ve been receiving from TrueDelta’s members, I have underestimated the impact of the unintended acceleration fiasco on Toyota’s future sales. This fiasco is going to hurt Toyota, possibly for years to come. The problem isn’t that many people feel that Toyotas are unsafe. Most seem to recognize that a very small percentage of Toyotas have suffered from unintended acceleration. But they’re hearing about problem after problem, so Toyota’s quality seems to be lower. Most of all, Toyota’s public statements have seemed dodgy, and people seem to feel that they cannot trust the company to keep owners’ best interests or even their safety in mind.

In other words, they’re feeling about Toyota much like they’ve felt for decades about Detroit. That the company is focused on sales and profits rather than the owners of its cars. That Toyota does not really care about them.

The odd thing here is that many people previously felt that Toyota could be trusted more than the typical auto company. Why? Because of their reputation for reliability? Because of the Prius?

The fact of the matter is that, when car owners have had problems with Toyotas, Toyota has been at least as bad as the average car company in taking care of them. Conducting TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey, I hear customer care horror stories involving virtually every manufacturer. If a car has a problem you feel it should not have had out of warranty, and you haven’t been regularly servicing your car at a particular dealer, that dealer will tell the manufacturer you’re not a valued customer, and you’ll get little or no out-of-warranty assistance. This is as true of Toyota as any other make. Have a problem that requires special help, and you’ll quickly learn how little they care. Toyota’s advantage was that its cars have been (and in many cases continue to be) more reliable, so people had fewer opportunities to experience how little they really care.

Among mainstream automakers (I have less information on luxury makes), Honda seems to be better than the others in readily paying for repairs after the warranty ends, buying back troublesome cars (always with a confidentiality clause, so you won’t hear about them), and in other ways taking care of customers.

But even with Honda I don’t get the sense that they do these things because they care more. The confidentiality clause when they buy back a car indicates their true interest. They simply concluded some time ago that taking care of customers would earn goodwill and, perhaps most importantly, protect their reputation and so earn them more money in the long run. And it has. It’s simply smart business. Other car companies don’t actually care less. They just aren’t as smart in this regard.

Toyota, though, behaves no differently than GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, or VW and has not in recent memory been more trustworthy than these companies. But apparently many people felt they were more trustworthy anyway. This illusion is now, in many cases, gone.

What does this matter? Well, when you trust someone to do the right thing, you don’t pay nearly as much attention to what they’re actually doing. You buy the car blindly. Going forward, car buyers will be scrutinizing both Toyota and its cars more closely. Those who want to buy a car with a minimum of research and thought are now much more likely to go elsewhere.

Three months ago I changed the survey system to greatly reduce the number of emails to Car Reliability Survey participants. And I’ve been very worried about this change ever since. With fewer emails might we end up with fewer responses? Or fewer repairs being reported, and so lower quality data? These are the questions that keep me awake at night.

Well, the quarter is over, so we have our answer. The percentage of people reporting repair trips in a given month has remained around 10 percent, so the quality of the data has not been affected. The quantity, on the other hand…

For over a year the response rate has been about 36 percent, so this has been our target. Last July the response rate was 36.7 percent, and in October it was 35.7 percent, a bit short.

Last month it was 38.0 percent, a level we haven’t seen since April 2008. Among new members, the response rate was a huge 56.0 percent. Even among members who joined over three years ago–many of these email addresses are probably no longer being checked regularly–the response rate was 28.3 percent. In absolute terms, our goal last month was 14,650 responses. We ended up with 15,424.

The current results include 295 models, plus partial results for another 290. It looks like the February update will include 356 models, plus partial results for another 287. Thanks to the higher response rate, well over half of our stats will now be full results.

So now I can worry about other things…

Over the last few months, the media have become increasingly critical of Toyota and its handling of the unintended acceleration problem. Recently, Ralph Nader joined the fray, charging that Toyota has lost control of its quality control process. Has it? Or is this problem indicative of a broader, deeper problem in how cars are currently developed, everywhere? Should this problem have been caught during development? The more serious concern could be how well Toyota and other auto makers learn of and fix the problems that customers experience.

Consider a few facts. First off, if the quality control lapse were remotely obvious, Toyota would have quickly pinpointed it once the reports of unintended acceleration started rolling in. They haven’t. First, back in October 2009, they blamed–and recalled–the floormats. Then, in January 2010, they blamed–and recalled–the gas pedal mechanism. Even now some instances and historical overviews indicate that neither of these is the real problem, and that said real problem might be in the software.

So the source of the problem hasn’t been easy to find, even once Toyota was aware of the problem. Discovering it during development, when not aware of the problem and so not looking for its source, would have been highly unlikely.

Second, the problem is rare. About 5,400,000 cars have been recalled for a problem that has been reported about 2,000 times. Even assuming that the problem has occurred ten times for every time that has been reported, we have something that happens in one out of every 250 cars.

To discover this problem, you would need to test several hundred cars, perhaps even several thousand cars. Well, these days all car manufacturers build far fewer physical prototypes than they used to. Much testing that used to occur in the real world now occurs in computer simulations. I doubt anyone still builds even one hundred pre-production “alpha” prototypes. A few dozen, perhaps.

Once production starts a few hundred “pilot” cars are distributed to employees to drive and note any problems. This brings up the third piece of the puzzle: the amount of time the car must be tested before the problem occurs. This clearly isnt a problem that happens every time the car is driven, or even during the first 10,000 miles.

During development, only a small number of prototypes are driven more than a few thousand miles. And hardly any of the pilot build cars accumulate more than a few thousand miles. Compressed development schedules play a role. Led by Toyota, auto makers spend far less time developing a car than they used to. This translates to less time for a problem to appear in a prototype.

Put all of the pieces together, and any problem that strikes a very small percentage of cars after these cars have been on the road for a while is not likely to be discovered during the car’s development.

Of course, there could yet be a smoking gun: it could turn out that someone did notice the unintended acceleration problem within Toyota, and they either decided not to pursue it or tried to pursue it and were blocked by others within the company. But there’s no hint of this yet.

Move beyond product development and Toyota becomes more culpable. The pedal recall includes one five-year-old model, the 2005 Avalon. Some reported cases include 2005 Camrys (though these aren’t included in the pedal recall). Even if a problem that affects a small percentage of cars didn’t pop up during development, it clearly started popping up once hundreds of thousands of cars were in customers’ hands. Dealers must have been aware of multiple cases of unintended acceleration by 2007 or 2008, and perhaps even back in 2005.

What system does Toyota have in place to learn of the problems car owners are experiencing and rapidly develop engineering fixes for them? Judging from responses to TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey, Toyota generally does a good job identifying and fixing common problems early in a model’s run. Which is why Toyotas generally continue to perform well in reliability surveys. Common problems are caught and fixed. In this sense, Toyota has not lost control of its quality control.

But the system failed in this case—which notably does not involve a common problem. Why? Does Toyota’s system focus much less attention on rare problems, even if they can result in fatal accidents? Does it track cars less closely after the first year or two of ownership? Either of these could be a contributing factor. But is anyone asking these questions?

These aren’t only questions for Toyota. All car makers should take Toyota’s current predicament as a wakeup call to improve their systems for learning of the rare but potentially fatal problems car owners are experiencing, thoroughly researching these problems, then fixing them.