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.
One may as well ask whether it’s fair to rate economobiles on the same scale as other vehicles. After all, to meet a low price point, econoboxes must cut costs somewhere.
In both cases, the answer is clear to me: if the reliability criteria are objective (such as TrueDelta’s “times in the shop” and “time required to fix a given problem”), then all vehicles can be rated on an equal footing. For a given vehicle, no matter the price, I can see from TrueDelta’s ratings that I can expect to have my vehicle in the shop a certain number of days, to fix a certain number of problems.
That being said, one thing that might make TrueDelta’s reliability ratings more useful would be using the mouseover comment system to indicate warranty coverage other than a standard 36-month/36,000 bumper-to-bumper warranty. Possible mouseover comments on warranties might include mentions of included basic maintenance for a given period (IIRC, BMW offers this on all BMW-branded vehicles), extended powertrain warranties (such as Suzuki’s 7-year/100,000 mile fully-transferable powertrain coverage), roadside assistance programs and warranty-covered loaner vehicles.
As an alternative to using the mouseover system to provide this information, perhaps adding warranty enhancements as a price adjustment on the TrueDelta price comparisons would help provide some indication of the value of said enhancements.
Great suggestion on adjustments for warranty and/or free maintenance. I’ve considered doing this in the past, but have wondered how much value to assign to these extras.
With free maintenance, the maintenance is very expensive if you look at home much it would cost if people did everything a dealer recommended at luxury dealer prices. On the other hand, the free maintenance programs include far fewer services than the typical dealer would recommend if the owner were paying for everything, and it’s generally possible to get the oil changed for far less than a luxury dealer charges.
For warranties, I’ve figured that a certain percentage of the car’s base price might be most appropriate, but haven’t given much thought to what this percentage should be.
Rather than coming up with a dollar figure, I would value extended warranties, free maintenance and the like by using the user feature value system.
That way, you can alert users that such features exist, without having to compare them and weigh their relative value yourself. Of course, statistical analysis of how your users value these features can help you calculate an appropriate default value later on….
As for what to use as a baseline for warranties, I suppose that a 36 months/36,000 miles bumper-to-bumper warranty and 60 months/60,000 miles powertrain warranty would adequately serve this role. Both Ford and Toyota offer this as their standard coverage.