Those stats are meaningless.
What are the problems reported? Their nature? Because I'd rather have 2 broken plastic switches than a head gasket issue.
46,000 is not a large group when divided by all the manufacturers and then models. Some are surely over represented and vice versa.
Would the fact that the study is American not create a bias? There millions of Americans who only buy homemade and believe it's better than anything else in the world.
And is there really such a big disparity between all GM products for example? Especially considering that many models share platform and motor.
Does the market group have anything to do with number of problems? Wealthy people generally spend more money on service and maintenance, same with older people. The latter group also drives less and doesn't push their vehicle to the limit.
Etc., etc.
Working on cars myself, for 8 years now, I know that Jaguar is NOT the most reliable vehicle. Neither is Buick, nor anything GM made. Ask any mechanic.
I believe the Japanese used these reports as well as others (consumer reports) to their advantage in the 1990's and they proved very meaningfully, but now they are not? What metric would you suggest?
I would assume that as a mechanic you see more domestic vehicles because they sold more of them over the past few decades? I would assume older cars are serviced more than the newer ones obviously so what you see in the garage are older vehicles......not resent ones like 2009 from that report?
I believe your comment on older Jaguars is correct, they used to be on the bottom of the list. Looks like they improved in the last couple years.
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J.D. Power notes that for Cadillac, Ford, Hyundai, Lincoln, and Mercury perceptions of reliability lag reality. No surprise, since (as I’ve found all too often) people often judge (and more often than not reject) data based on how these data fit their perceptions rather than judging their perceptions based on how they fit the data.
The outraged owners argued that TrueDelta’s results could not be correct, since Jaguar had just been declared the most dependable make by J.D. Power. I pointed out that the VDS covers the third year of ownership, 2006 in that case, and that Jaguar had discontinued, redesigned, or replaced every model in its line save the XJ in the interim. So the results did not apply to the XF, or the current XK for that matter.
Well, J.D. Power has now released the 2010 Vehicle Dependability Survey (VDS), which covers 2007s in their third year of ownership, and, as predicted, the redesigned XK has, all by its lonesome, sunk Jaguar’s ranking from 1st to 23rd. And it’ll only get uglier once the XF is reflected in these stats in another two years.
and the motor was FAST but the body was like a tin can. I could never underdtand why Honda can make such a powerful bike engine but the car engines, twice their size, has no guts unless you pimp the thing out filling the engine bay with bolt on's.
