Are Detroit’s sins all in the past?

Manufacturing productivity guru Jim Harbour recently suggested that GM’s and Ford’s problem is not manufacturing cost but that “they have a legacy of poor quality in the past, so they have to put $3,000 on the hood of a car because of lingering perceptions.” This is an argument heard frequently from Detroit’s backers lately, that GM and Ford (Chrysler not so much) are being evaluated based on cars they made decades ago, not cars they’ve made recently.

Is this true?

First, consider the real question:

How often, or at least how soon, does a car model have frequent enough or costly enough problems that the owner concludes that the car is a piece of junk?

Guess what: no one currently provides the stats needed to answer this question. Not even TrueDelta.com. Counting the number of (usually minor) problems during the first 90 days, as the industry’s most-watched metric does, isn’t going to answer this question. So people–on both sides of the issue–are basing their opinions on a handful of personal experiences or a limited amount of tangentially related information, at best. More often: hearsay, or even just what they want to believe to be true. To put it another way: we have no solid alternative to Harbour’s “lingering perceptions,” so people continue to rely on them.

We’d love to provide this information–but need more participants to do so. Even then, most of Detroit’s products that have low repair rates are still too new to tell how they’ll do over the long haul. We’re still years from being able to conclude how the Ford Fusion will hold up, to give one example.

Oddly, even though no one really knows how often various cars prove to be unbearably troublesome, few people seem to feel the need for better car reliability information. Why not?