Darth,
Wrong as usual – read this
Most Reliable of 2006
By DAN LIENERT
See the list here
Wondering why the Japanese automakers are eating up market share that formerly belonged to Americans? Here’s all the explanation you need.
There is nothing, a Wall-Street adage says, that a bit of good product won’t cure. The Japanese know this, and they have let good vehicles drive them to financial security and sales volumes that never seem to stop increasing. This month’s New York International Auto Show saw the unveilings of two new and improved Japanese cars — the next-generation Mitsubishi Outlander and Lexus LS models — but the old, outgoing models they are replacing were already among a dozen or so of the market’s most reliable cars.
When we look at the slide show that follows this piece — a list of the nine most reliable cars on the market — one question comes to mind: Where are the American cars? While certain U.S. companies, such as General Motors’ General Motors Buick subsidiary, are building increasingly dependable cars, only three brands — Honda, Toyota Motor and Toyota’s Lexus subsidiary — meet the most stringent standards for reliability.
Click here for the slideshow.
In particular, those three Japanese companies are the only companies on the market to have individual models receiving top reliability marks from both Consumer Reports and J.D. Power and Associates. Each of the nine cars in the slide show received a “predicted reliability” rating of “much better than average,” the highest possible, from Consumer Reports, and five out five stars in J.D. Power’s “overall quality” and/or “overall dependability” assessments. Each car in the slide show is Japanese.
While American cars are built better than ever these days, they still are not as reliable as Japanese autos. With such new cars as the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger sedans, DaimlerChrysler has shown recently that American cars can have world-beating style. Cadillac is showing that American luxury cars can keep pace with European competition. Now, an American automaker needs to challenge Toyota and Honda in terms of reliability, and the process begins by studying what has worked for the Japanese.
Lexus’ old slogan was “The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection,” and it wasn’t just lip service.
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Best Sedans 2006
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While the company has world-renowned manufacturing methods, “the pursuit of perfection” is inculcated so vigorously into Toyota’s corporate culture that Lexus’ trademark reliability is engineered into cars before they ever hit the factories. Quality is monitored every step of the way. Failure is not accepted.
All major automakers build preproduction prototype models to iron out design, engineering and manufacturing wrinkles before mass production. In recent years, Toyota became known for building around one-tenth the number of prototypes per production model that automakers such as General Motors would. The only way Toyota and Lexus could do this was by learning to engineer parts that don’t fail.
For the Japanese vehicles in the slide show, the superior reliability ratings in question concern ratings for new models. In preparing our list, we excluded from consideration all nameplates that are headed for discontinuation or replacement. This kept such reliable, outgoing cars as the aforementioned Mitsubishi Outlander and Lexus LS from the list.
Not every car has reliability ratings. Such new cars as Audi’s A3 hatchback need to be on the market longer in order for customers to generate information on problems the vehicles may have. And such blue-blooded cars as Maybach and Bentley models tend not to have reliability ratings because their volumes are too low to make for effective studies.
The difference between J.D. Power’s “overall quality” and “overall dependability” scores is that “quality” concerns owner-reported problems in the first 90 days of ownership, and “dependability” concerns owner-reported problems after three years of ownership.
Please follow the link below to see the results of our research, and to see why Japanese cars are still setting the standards for which American cars should be aiming.
Click here for the slideshow.
Editor’s note: Consumer Reports’ reliability ratings came from the organization’s Web site. At press time, Consumer Reports had not confirmed the data despite multiple e-mail messages from Forbes.com requesting it to do so.
2006-05-02 10:31:01
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