We start each round of surveys on the first Tuesday of the month. So a few days remain to gather responses for the August results, which will cover members’ repair experiences through the end of June.

This has been a difficult month. Response rates have been down compared to previous quarters. Just a few percentage points, but that represents hundreds of responses. The reasons are unclear, but the worsening economy might be having an impact. Many people might be worried about their jobs, so they feel they don’t have time to deal with relatively minor concerns like TrueDelta’s survey. And they probably feel that their next car purchase is now much farther off, so no need for reliability information any time soon.

We also appear to be having more trouble with over-zealous spam filters. TrueDelta has never sent spam, and the better filters recognize this. But many email providers use imprecise filters. If only everyone used gmail…

Even with the lower response rate, nearly 6,700 responses have been returned so far. If not a single additional response came in, we’d still have results for 134 model / model year combinations, and results for another 148 with asterisks.

But we’ll have more. At the end of each quarter, I note which models are just a response or two short of a minimum, and send special emails to members who own them. A couple dozen models are this close, so we’ll hopefully end up with full results for about 150 of them and asterisked results for another 140. This has been the goal since the beginning of the month, and it is within reach, even with the lower-then-expected response rate.