A big thank you to everyone who has helped with TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished together. Over the past twelve years we’ve helped countless people. Unfortunately, maintaining traffic and revenue (on top of operating the site) has become far too much work for two people. So we’ve made the difficult decision that the July 2018… More →
Category: Site Changes
Site Changes
New Survey Form–Many Improvements
This morning we launched a new survey form that eliminates a big longstanding weakness of the site and adds some major features members have been asking for. We’ve wanted to do it for literally years, but other projects and crises kept getting in the way. So we’re very happy to finally have the new form out the door. In the… More →
New Reliability-By-Generation Pages
We know that the amount of information TrueDelta provides can be overwhelming. To make our reliability stats easier to grasp, we’ve changed the default pages to by generation rather than by model year. With fewer ratings on the page, we can use revised, larger faces and also include photos of the cars. The by-year stats (with absolute repair frequencies rather… More →
In Reliability: New Faces, New Scales, and by Generation
People sometimes find the breadth and depth of TrueDelta’s car reliability information overwhelming. Even those that don’t often want a quick snapshot of how a model has been faring over multiple model years. For both purposes we decided to add car reliability stats by model generation. What’s a model generation? When a car model receives a significant update, it begins… More →
Updated Car Reliability Stats, Now With Reliability Trends
Every time we add a new feature, I wish we could have added it earlier (unfortunately, it’s just not possible to do everything immediately). This is especially the case with the latest addition: car reliability trends We updated our car reliability stats–for the 34th time–at the end of February. Each of the previous 33 times, our stats have only reflected… More →
Charts and Graphs
TrueDelta has perhaps been a bit heavy on numbers. Aside from being pretty to look at, charts and graphs can effectively convey more information at a glance than a page full of stats can. So we’ve been adding these to our key pages. We now have charts or graphs on the repair-odds pages, car problem description pages, and real-world fuel… More →
Total legroom spec
Among my car-related pet peeves, I hate it when I hear that one car has “more rear legroom” than another when such a claim ignores that the other car has significantly more front legroom. Among the ugly secrets of legroom specs is one that should be, but rarely seems to be, obvious: you can move at least the front seat,… More →
Revised Specs Pages, New Features Pages
Since the beginning of the site I’ve maintained a database with the specs and features for cars sold in the U.S. This database supported our car price and features tool, and our single model specs pages. But if you simply wanted to compare the specs for two models, you had to configure them and see the prices as well. And… More →
2012: The Year Back
I don’t talk much about what Gayla and I wrestle with from day to day to keep the site up and running (mostly me) and improving (mostly her). Some of it is fun, but a lot of it isn’t. Well, in 2011 we descended into site owner-operator hell. And in 2012 we fought our way back out.
Why the sad face? (reworked car reliability scale)
When we first developed the formulas for graphically representing TrueDelta’s car reliability stats, we had far less data. We had to rely on cars with small sample sizes to get an idea of the breadth of the range from “fewest repair trips” to “most repair trips.” We thoroughly revisited these calculations with the latest update. This time around, with more… More →