The report says that half of 15-year-old vehicles still on road. Granted, this means increased reliability of those vehicles, but what about more recent vehicles? My impression is that more recent vehicles - especially "Japanese" brands now manufactured inNorth America -are less reliable than those produced in that golden era. Am I wrong?

From here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...amp;print=true

They keep going ... and going ...

Study after study confirms that cars and trucks are much better built, with fewer quality problems or defects, than ever before.
[/align]JEREMY CATO
From Thursday's Globe and Mail

January 10, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST

The days of cars marooned in the breakdown lane and several-day waits for overworked mechanics are long gone — and that's good news for consumers, if not for service bays.
J.D. Power and Associates' latest survey of long-term vehicle reliability, the Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS), found that quality problems have fallen 20 per cent since 2003.
Fewer broken vehicles translates into a cut in service and parts sales, says the U.S. National Automobile Dealers Association. In the United States, service and parts sales fell to $80.5-billion (U.S.) in 2006, from $85-billion in 2005.
Cars and light trucks are better than ever and getting more reliable still. In the past two decades, auto makers have dramatically improved quality and reduced defects. The most trouble-plagued cars today are still far more reliable than the best cars of 20 years ago.[/align]
"Over 50 per cent of the vehicles bought 15 years ago — an eternity by any standard for a vehicle — are still on the road today and this is almost double the survival rate from only seven years ago," says Dennis DesRosiers of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants in Richmond Hill, Ont., whose firm does an annual study on vehicle longevity.
"Can you imagine how high the survival rate will be when the current vehicles reach their 15th birthday?" he adds.
Naturally this is good news for consumers, who now suffer from far fewer troublesome breakdowns and nagging glitches than ever before. Quality improvements are also lowering warranty costs for auto makers. If there is a downside, better cars are bad news for the auto service business.
Customers used to take their vehicles in for a tune-up every 45,000 kilometres or so. Now many newer models can go without one for up to 120,000 to 130,000 km or more. And parts that had to be changed every 48,000 km now last three times longer. Many auto makers now recommend oil changes every 12,000 km, rather than the 7,000-to-8,000 km levels in the past.
Quality has improved enough for some to call into question J.D. Power's long-running Initial Quality Study (IQS), which has functioned for 20 years as a kind of Oscar award program for new vehicle quality. Most of the major auto makers have made so much progress, in fact, some observers suggest the IQS does not offer a great deal to the consumer.
This is because the IQS compiles consumer complaints, based on a detailed questionnaire, about problems encountered during the first 90 days of ownership. It takes into account such things as the distinction between a "dead by the roadside" failure and a customer's dissatisfaction with certain design choices. Case in point: in years past, some German auto makers were hammered for offering poor cup holders.
In the 2007 IQS, Ford Motor Co.'s Lincoln brand scored 100 problems per 100 cars. That means, on average, buyers of new 2007 model Lincolns reported one problem per car to J.D. Power. Mercedes owners reported 111 problems per 100 cars.
Put another way, Mercedes owners identified, on average, 0.1 more problems with each individual vehicle than did the Lincoln owners. Of course, there is no such thing as a 0.1 problem. So the Mercedes score suggests that out of every 10 cars, nine had one problem and one had two.
This isn't such a big deal, considering that Mercedes has a 90-per-cent success rate when it comes to delivering a totally problem-free owner experience during the first 90 days. Not bad at all.
And the industry as a whole is doing a pretty good job. Across all brands, the average for problems per 100 cars in the IQS has hovered between 118 and 124 for the past four years.
Car makers, it should be noted, have cut the average number of problems in half twice in the 20 years since J.D. Power began publishing its survey results. The point is, today's buyer really needn't worry about a new car falling apart during its first three months on the road, which certainly wasn't the case 20 or 30 years ago.
Nor have quality gains been limited to luxury brands and Asian brands, such as Toyota and Honda, with traditionally high quality.
Hyundai Motor Co., once a quality laggard, now consistently scores among the very best in a wide range of quality studies. Ford, which battled through a series of embarrassing design and quality issues in recent years, has now jumped to the head of the pack among Detroit auto makers.
In fact, in its latest quality survey, Consumer Reports found that 41 of 44 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models scored average or better in predicted reliability. The Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan (nearly identical to the Fusion but not sold in Canada) "are among the most reliable cars," Consumer Reports says.
David Champion, senior director of Consumer Reports' auto test centre, says Ford's quality remains below Toyota and Honda, but notes that Ford is now competing with those brands instead of with other Detroit-based manufacturers.
"They're definitely in what we would call the top tier," Champion says. "They are making serious inroads."
Ford is doing well, but not Detroit as a whole. Ninety per cent of the cars and trucks on Consumer Reports' list of the most-reliable vehicles are from Japanese manufacturers, not Detroit auto makers. Toyota still has more models on that list than any other auto maker and its Lexus brand remains the gold standard in quality.
And what Consumer Reports says definitely matters to new car buyers: there are four million subscribers to its print magazine and 2.7 million subscribers to its website. In 2005, Forrester Research Inc. found that Consumer Reports topped all other publications, websites and even advice from friends as a key source of car-purchase information.
Automotive researcher George Peterson of AutoPacific Inc., a market research company in Tustin, Calif., says survey data show Consumer Reports is in "the top three or four" influencers of car purchases in Canada. In focus groups about vehicles, "a high percentage" of consumers volunteer that they go to Consumer Reports first as they start car shopping.
Basically, Consumer Reports works as an early "filter" that helps buyers sort out the vehicles to reject, Peterson says.
While Consumer Reports has a huge impact, it is not the only quality arbiter or indicator available to today's car buyer. Plenty of other studies look at not only things gone wrong, but also things gone right, and even the emotional connection buyers have with their vehicles. Some studies aim to blend all these elements.
Take Strategic Vision's latest Total Quality Index (TQI). The San Diego, Calif.-based company measures overall new-vehicle owner satisfaction through all aspects of the ownership experience, including the buying process, brand loyalty and the overall perception of quality. A total of 166 attributes are gathered and then weighted by their emotional impact, to reach a final score on a 1,000-point scale.
The

 

Seems to me a big part is that corrosion protection has gotten so much better in the last 15 or 20 years. Mechanical problems can ALWAYS be fixed. Its just expensive sometimes. Corrosion in a unibody can be fundamentally un-fixable.

And as cars become more & more expensive, it's easier to justify the cost of repairing them. Fewer people are in a position to use a problem as an excuse to throw away the whole car & buy another.

 

There is a story told about Henry Ford in the early days. It concerns the Model T. When it began to appear in breakers yards, Henry sent engineers to examine them to identify parts which were still ok. The rationale being that those parts were over-engineered and should be made to a lower quality. Decades later Mercedes-Benz went down the same route, or rather M-B accountants did, and quality went down the toilet. They are only now starting to recover earlier quality standards. Morale of the story is - never let accountants make decisions on manufacturing methods in fact never let accountants make decisions - make them stick to counting beans. You can be efficient or effective. Efficiency often means "as cheap as possible using low grade labour" whereas effective means giving the customer what they want because in general customers appreciate and will pay for quality.
Bloody 'ell - its a long time since I gave that lecture.

 

Speaking of reliability I've seen a number of Peugot and Citroen vehicles running in various races but they aren't sold in the U.S. anyone know if those are like the ford and chevy of europe or what category do they fall into? Better than a Yugo or Daewoo or about the same crappy quality...?

Hopefully that makes sense... *L*

and I'd agree with the research and findings but I attribute a lot of that to switching from Carb to F.I. since 92 (15 years ago) is when the major push for all FI and no carb came about... Carbs can be troublesome to say the least and even small particulate can cause one of them to break down on the side of the road.... Just a theory...

 

I remember back about 1980 when all the 'experts' were wailing about how fuel injection was so complicated & nobody could work on it. Why not stick with something basic & bulletproof, like a carburator...

OMG Fuel Injection was gonna be the end of the world for people who like to work on their own cars.

 

Peugot and Citroen are typically French. Quite quirky [especially Citroen] Quality was crap but has improved dramatically [once those minor bits have fallen off.] Peugot was very popular here for their hot hatch the 205GTI which, along with the Golf GTI, was one of the first rocket-powered roller skates - take a tiny car and shove in the biggest engine you make.
Both marques are very active in World Rally championships where the cars run at insane speeds over dirt tracks or, as in Finland, over roads covered in ice and snow. WRC much more exciting than Formula 1 or your oval track racing. Yugo ? Thats going back a long way. All examples have long since been eaten by the rust moth. Daewoo now badged as Chevrolet as if that fooled anyone. However, for sheer insanity you must see Renault Clio. They have a version where the engine is so big that they had to remove the rear seats to fit it in as a mid-engined car [originally a fwd car]. It was tested on Top Gear who concluded that the car was mental, cheap, but what a buzz to drive. Jeremy almost had an orgasm over it. So, not a Ford or Chevy to answer your question or a Yugo/Daewoo.
Sorry to go on but I just remembered about early Citroen the famous 2cv. It had a corrugated tin body, canvas seats, and a two-cylinder air-cooled engine. You could strip the body down using the wheel brace. Part of the design spec was that it had to be capable of of transporting boxes of eggs across a ploughed field without breaking any. Very popular in rural France and with sandal- wearing college lecturers. An iconic car, many still survive and command high prices.