TrueDelta

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.