Every time Consumer Reports or J.D. Power releases the results of a reliability survey, much of the press rushes to reduce the message to a single question: are Detroit’s cars as reliable as Japanese cars?
The same answers have followed in all recent years: the gap is closing, and some domestic cars now score as well as the imports, but on average, or if you sum up the category winners, a gap remains. So we see the same oversimplified headlines and articles over and over.
Why the rush to reduce the issue of reliability to Detroit vs. Japan? Does the press or reading public try to similarly oversimplify acceleration times? No, in that case people expect test scores for not only a specific model but a specific powertrain.
The same should be done for reliability. The fact of the matter is, the reliability scores for a make’s models often vary widely. Some require few repairs, some require more repairs. Looking up individual model scores does require a bit more work from everyone, but not much more. Well, when such scores are provided. (TrueDelta provides them.)
The focus on Detroit vs. Japan not only misleads some people into buying Japanese models that are actually unreliable, but makes it difficult for those Detroit car models that do score well to get the consideration they deserve. This is the perception gap Detroit complains about–because it is one thing threatening the survival of an entire industry.
In defense of oversimplification, some things do pertain to the manufacturer as a whole, if not a nationality as a whole. Most importantly: customer care. How well the customer is treated when a problem occurs will be fairly constant for all of a make’s models. And, as I’ve written before, Detroit’s customer care needs to be much better. Too often these companies, when forced to choose between covering an early failure out of warranty and losing a customer, choose to lose the customer.
That’s a separate if related issue, though. When it comes to the number of problems a car is likely to have, car buyers, car manufacturers, and the people the latter employ would all benefit if consumers stopped trying to oversimplify reliability and at least looked at the scores for individual car models. And it wouldn’t hurt if the press took the lead on this one rather than “giving the people what they want.” After all, isn’t this the same line Detroit uses to defend its overdependence on SUV sales?