From ehsnils at Subaru Legacy forum LegacyGT.com I just learned of another source of vehicle reliability information. The Swedish government agency that inspects all cars three or more years old posts its results to the web, here: Bilprovningen Inspection Results.

They post not only the percentage of cars that failed the inspection, but which part was responsible for the failure. Thankfully, they’ve even translated their results into English.

Great info. But, as always, it’s important to know what’s being measured.

In this case, you’re not likely to learn of problems that make the car undriveable–because the owner would have fixed those before driving to the inspection. At the other extreme, you won’t learn of problems that don’t threaten safety, because those parts of the car aren’t inspected.

So, Bilprovningen provides a good record of problems that don’t render the car instantly undriveable, but that do threaten safety. Good to have, but not everything.

Their major weakness, though, is that cars are only inspected when they are three years old, or older. Also, they don’t seem to update their posted information regularly: the results currently shown are from 2006. So the most recent model year covered is 2003.

This is a problem because all of the cars surveyed are now two years older. So their reliability could have declined substantially.

In contrast, TrueDelta:

–provides a record of all repairs, from the most major to the most minor

–updates promptly four times a year