Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

It's hilarious the mental gymnastics these fictional people will leap through to avoid earning the ire of their employer, and it's absolutely shocking how true-to-life it often is.

There's reason to doubt that (from 3 days ago):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/a-tiny-pharmacy-is-id...

This is probably Tesla's strongest point, having a problem with the product you paind for and not having personalized response makes you feel powerless while response from someone who seems to understand the problem and the issues it creates is a such a huge difference even if the issue is not resolved. I always forgive companies that did sloppy job but cared enough to appologise and explain why it happend. You don't have to have a celebrity CEO to do that.

They’re under investigation for possibly hiding recall and issuing OTA instead that surprised people with sudden range loss (https://www.businessinsider.com/nhtsa-investigating-tesla-up...)

They force customers to go over arbitration to fix yellowing entertainment screen on cars as young as few months. They tell people it’s normal wear and tear due to using cat in the sun (https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/yellow-screen-force-...)

Their service centers are over the capacity for years and cars can be stuck waiting for repairs and parts for months.

(I have no idea what "quality" means here, and how you can put a number on that, that rises 3.5x, but that's beside the point).

With one sentence, Tesla is telling 2015 customers that they got screwed over, and future customers that they should wait 4 years after a new model comes out before buying it, because they need that time to figure out all the quality issues.

On the other hand, you don't have to fix a problem you haven't created.

Most of Tesla problems are self inflicted.

Moreover "Model X vehicles today is 3.5 times better than the quality of brand new Model X cars from 2015."

According to which metric?

It sounds a lot like "this is the fastest Mac ever built, 2.5x faster than the previous generation"[1] but on the market cheaper or faster options (or both) were already available.

[1] in small writings "according to bench X and taking the best result. On average the improvement is about +0.3%"

> "It was a supplier-related issue".

Passing the buck is really not a great look to start with. It makes the rest of the response seem like a series of excuses.

Tesla chose the supplier. Tesla built and inspected and sold and shipped the car with those parts. This is a Tesla-related issue. The only time Tesla should mention a supplier issue is in response to, "why can't you sell me a car?"

> "[It] did not pose any threat to vehicle safety".

That's good, but this isn't the safety survey.

> "[T]here was a[...] false service alert [... that was fixed] within two weeks of being reported".

I'm not even sure how to react to this one. Bringing my car in to be told "false alarm" is really not reassuring. And two weeks to fix a false alert doesn't help me - I've probably already brought it in for service.

> "This proactive approach to improved reliability is one of the reasons why Tesla is the highest rated car brand among consumers, according to Consumer Reports." (Paraphrased:) Our cars are the safest and best performing, and Model S is #1 in satisfaction.

To me, blaming a supplier for the issues is a terrible way to start, and this is likewise a terrible closing.

"You just fell in the rankings to come in 3rd to last in our reliability survey. Any comments?" "Our cars are the safest and fastest and we have always ranked #1 on your customer satisfaction survey."

Those stats are undeniably good. They also make me think those are the stats the company cares about a lot more than reliability.

My next car will not be made in the US, regardless of manufacturer.

The J-cars (cavalier/sunfire/sunbird) existed b/c of the second oil crisis in '78. GM needed something FWD, smaller than the X-cars, that could get better fuel economy than the RWD V-6 and V-8 cars it had been selling in the '70s. The thought was that people in the US would buy these because they had to, not because small cars would suddenly become appealing to Americans in their own right.

The Js were never terribly profitable, the lower-end ones were almost certainly sold at cost to boost the company's mileage compliance numbers. The traditional easy way of squeezing costs out of a car is to pull them out of the interior & trim, which would explain the sunroof, the dash electronics, the trunk closures and taillights.

The engine you got in yours is almost certainly the Quad OHC, one of the last Oldsmobile powertrain designs...in its original 2.3L config, Olds had it making 185hp (in 1989, with no turbo!). Powerful but with no balance shafts, it pulled well but sounded & shook like a pair of wolverines trapped in a dryer, which is why the 2.4L version got balance shafts and was detuned to 150hp.

The bigger reason that Japanese buyers stayed away from the Cavalier was probably due to it's engine size (JP taxes at certain displacements, I know going over 2.0L is a bump) as well as vehicle size (at least according to Wikipedia, it was too big to be taxed as a compact there.)

Of course, being a J body doesn't help. The fact that many of the automakers had/have an unfortunate tendency to cannibalize themselves doesn't help either. Another example of this behavior from the 80s was the way GM would treat any project that could hurt sales of the Corvette (That whole mess with the Fiero, the way the Turbo 3.8 was quietly shooed away and ignored...)

This infighting was at least part of the reason GM tried to start another car company in the US called Saturn. If you thought Subaru people were culty... Saturn had a whole thing where people across the country drove to the headquarters every year. They managed to build cars that were a bit more reliable than the rest of the GM line (Oh, they still had a couple of problems though. And the engines loved oil.) The original models also had a unique part line and were built in a plant that tried to follow a more Toyota/Honda style mentality. Oh. And plastic body panels. In any case, I tend to see more Saturns still on the road than any other GM small car of the 90s.

It worked for a bit, until GM got tired of waiting for their sales to get up to speed, and started meddling with them TOO.

Sometimes I wonder if the US auto industry suffers a bit competitively vs Germany and Japan due to a higher amount of "brain drain" to other higher-paying forms of STEM jobs in tech.

Here is video of a Mercedes C-lass production line moving as workers assemble by the way: https://youtu.be/z6c_Zs5DG0s?t=531

What they do, they do well. Their reviews are consistently: "what my mom would say if she drove it".

Consumer Reports is not Car and Driver.

I've driven GM, VWs, Hondas, Toyotas and currently drive a Ford F150.

I've had the fortune of rarely having serious problems with any of them, but we haven't kept most of the vehicles for more than 4-5 years for a variety of reasons (VW Golfs are fine when you're single, but not when you have a couple of kids (at least not in America...we're spoiled.)

Hats off to Toyota though. My parents have been driving my wife's old 2003 Camry for the past 3-4 years. It still runs great and up until this past weekend had zero issues. The master power window switch failed and now the rear driver side window fails to come up. Amazon is delivering the replacement part today for a whopping $23.50.

A regular maintenance schedule does wonders for the reliability of a vehicle.

I had a friend's dad who was one of the few people I talked to who, as a Japanese brand enthusiast, went out of his way to find a Chevy/Geo prizm - same mechanical bits as a Corolla, built in the same factory, but way cheaper because of all the people who reflexively avoided American brands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_factories#Unite...

It was a frustrating experience. Their obsession with quality made even the smallest tasks difficult and tedious. 3,000-line testing spreadsheets, where even one failure pooched the whole deal.

But you can’t argue with the results.

Good quality is difficult and tedious. I like to think that the work I do is of exceptional quality, but I am often met with outright hostility by American engineers, when I talk about my methodology.

I’m not being snooty, or projecting onto others. I’m merely talking about what I do, and I’m treated as if I’m eating a ham sandwich in Temple.

It's a funny thing to me that no one ever points this out in advance. Where were the articles about Boeing's move from an engineering culture to a financial one? Instead, we wait for the natural cycle of a business to arrive, then make up some answer, like "financialization" to explain it.

How come a hacker site doesn't acknowledge how difficult it is to "stay on top" as a business?

>You see the effect a bit with Tesla where I'm sure Musk would love to focus on quality but has to rush things out to make decent quarterly numbers or risk going bust by not getting ongoing financing

Again, more post hoc reasoning.

Elon Musk negotiated the biggest corporate pay package in history, but he didn't tie it to product quality, did he? Maybe that's why he focuses so much on share price and market cap and quarterly numbers? Nah, couldn't be...

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk ordered his employees to stop putting nearly finished Model 3s through a critical test before leaving the company’s factory in Fremont, California, according to an internal document viewed by Business Insider. It’s called the brake-and-roll test, and it ensures the car is correctly aligned. An industry expert told Business Insider that every automaker does this test to ensure quality and function."†

Tesla constantly make short term decisions that cost them massively down the line.

† https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tesla-elon-musk-orders-en...

It may also be the case that everything is reliable enough for that to no longer be a significant differentiator between brands, and development money will be spent elsewhere.

That's only one side of the problem out of many. It has more to do with the general attitude and culture withing the company, which ultimately stems from wider culture.

Tesla is currently enthusiastically repeating all of GM's failures with their engineers screaming murder, and being dismissed.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+welding+cracks

If we're talking about Tesla in particular, if you've ever watched those transplant drivetrain videos you can see that aside for the battery temperature control and a few other things it isn't super complex.

Where Teslas are complex is everything else. Tesla started as a luxury brand and you can really tell even in the Model 3. Everything is electrified. Everything. Even the door handles themselves have electric motors in them. That little flap that changes the direction of the airflow in other cars? Electric motor in a Model 3. The design aesthetic is almost a contradiction with the reality: minimalism brought to you by huge increases in back-end complexity.

I'm not claiming this is intrinsically bad (nor good). But I am pointing out that when you complicate simple things you add more points of failure. The "debate" is if the assembly/maintenance/etc costs are worth the benefits provided, and that is largely a matter of opinion (and how much people value the benefits).

The drivetrain is simpler, but most parts of the car are similar and share the same potential weaknesses.

The body may rust, the doors have hinges and seals that may leak water, the windscreen may crack or its seams may leak, the brake discs will wear out (even if more slowly due to energy regeneration feature), the brake fluid pipes may corrode and leak, the suspension system wears out with every bump on the road and the springs may break or the shock absorbers become ineffective; the steering has ball joints and tie rod ends that will become loose and need to be replaced, there are heaters and A/C which have pumps and pipes and sensors and controlling electronics, the lights have to work and they have alignment motors, the windscreen has wipers and their controls, there are mirrors and their adjustment systems...

All these parts need to work, and getting the design right requires immense competence and experience from the manufacturer. All of these are required in an electric car just like in an ICE car.

I've been frugal about cars and over the past 10 years have bought cheap ones (here it means French cars, because their quality reputation is worse than their actual quality, and therefore they are cheap to run).

None of the cars have needed replacing or major repairs in the drivetrain or fuel system (apart from one Suzuki 20 years ago that had rust in the gas tank). I've always given them up because the things that wear out are in the other mechanical parts, mostly steering, suspension and brakes. None of the cars I've had have been beyond repair, but the cost of new parts and work to make them roadworthy exceed the price of the car (I don't want to do too much of that work myself.)

To your point though, FCA might have something pretty similar to that 3rd party player. Their Uconnect 4 drops into a pretty wide variety of brands they own, I dont know if any car company still makes as many skus and variants as FCA does. Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat,Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, and Ram Trucks, with Peugeot and Citroën coming.

FCAs infotainment system consistently ranks highly in multiple roundups. Overall, European companies rank much higher than Japanese ones.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/car-infotainment-system-a...

https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/choose...

Some of the newer vehicles I've had the misfortune of driving require three of four clicks to turn on the air conditioning.

I'm currently living in Leipzig, which still has bombed-out looking empty buildings from the time of the Iron Curtain (although things have finally been picking up over the past few years). And yet even here the infrastructure is better than in San Francisco or any other part of the USA I've visited. I'm originally from Canada, and I'm sad to say that, although some things are better than the USA (like the roads and the trash), it's not by much, and it's still terrible compared to the rest of the first world.

My apartment in the Netherlands is 100% drywall but I need to run into it at full force to even make a dent. To make a hole in it I need tools.

While I agree with you on other points, I take issue with this. American grocery stores are a real treat when visiting. Produce is colorful, plentiful, and delicious thanks to American embrace of GMO's and subsidies for farmers. Raw ingredients such as flour are available in huge variety (try finding something as simple as peanut oil at your local Lidl). Even the quality of "junk" food is comparably fantastic, as you won't find a frozen pizza like DiGiorno anywhere else. This is all before you visit a Whole Foods, which takes quality and variety to a point which organic supermarkets elsewhere in the world can't compare.

Europe, on the other hand, is so obsessed with the discount model, so disinterested in variety, and so opposed to GMO's, that their supermarkets are downright frustrating. Yes, the meat, cheese, and chocolate is great, but it stops there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome

It seems like a pretty useful metaphor that I wasn't familiar with.

I really do hear you on the housing quality - it's ridiculous what people are willing to put up with over there. We have friends living in the southern bay area who pay 3.5k for a 2.5 bedroom apartment in an apartment complex - the whole thing calls itself "Luxury Residencies". Ain't no luxury there. Like you describe everything is built extra cheap: from the walls, to the kitchen appliances and the plumbing. There is a massive top-loader in their supply closet that sounds like it runs on it's own ICE, built in the 50s. In Europe this would be considered a very basic apartment but it's already considered 1-2 levels higher than average and not even 3 years old.

I do think there is something to your Galapagos syndrome theory.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InteriorDesign/comments/8ths03/germ...

I have had American visitors marvel at the (German built) windows in my French home, calling them something you'd see on a space station. On the other hand they think I must be having money problems for not having a tumble dryer (only poor people hang their laundry to dry) or not having airco.

I have this a bit uneasy impression[1] that a really significant chunk of US is basically a developing country with bigger cars.

[1] Based only on visiting a few developing countries as well as a few states of US. Not on any statistics or data whatsoever.

If foreigners are willing to give Americans stuff for paper there is a real pressure for Americans not to bother making stuff and printing more paper instead. That probably influences a lot of the decisions behind American made consumer goods.

> The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California.

I live a long way from California, but the first stop should always be to check the local tax code, financial incentives and regulations. Most countries I've been to end up having strange tax incentives that influence how much money gets spent on primary residences; and taxes can put a real dampener on what gets done. I speak mainly from experience in Australia where there are massive tax incentives for a person to spend money on their primary home.

Wait, what UX does a fridge need? Mine just has a scroll wheel which goes from cool to cold.

After a tedious search, we wound up buying $2.60 "Sara Lee Artesano Style Bread" which is still less good than a 70c loaf of Hovis in the UK, and certainly less good than fresh made French bread (which in my opinion is world class). But it is very notable that it has a 7~10 shelf life, not one month like other supermarket breads, is actually soft, and not overly sweet.

It is kind of unfortunately that in the US basically passable bread is called "Artesano" and earns a price premium. Many living in the US haven't had the opportunity to try elsewhere to compare. The strangest thing about this is that you'd expect the US's bread to be much cheaper (given the quality reduction) but that wasn't at all my experience (in fact fresher bread in Europe was substantially cheaper than long-shelf-life-bagged bread in the US).

This is a strange comparison, housing prices depend on many different factors and you can get really crappy small apartments (including the plumbing) in expensive parts of London or Monaco for that kind of money.

If the $2m home in California has mediocre doors and plumbing, it's probably just due to lack of attention/clue by previous owners, possibly also from abundance of crappy plumbers because everyone in the business makes plenty of money from rich people in the area.

You hear people wanting stainless steel appliances...but never discussing their quality.

Don't think so. My family moved to the US in the early 80s and all the same observations applied back then.

The most recent example - Vaillant vs Honeywell heating controllers. Vaillant looks fancy with decorative, smoothly flowing elements, knobs and fancy backlight, and the Honeywell unit is, well, spartan: big LCD letters, primitive graphics. Vaillant is crazy - it is too slow to react on temperature changes, the interface is just horrible: imagine no escape or back button - you just have to idle a minute to go back to the "main screen." It takes 30 seconds or so to connect wirelessly to the boiler, sometimes it fails or even freezes and requires a reset, and I can go on forever. I hate the fucking thing. Honeywell... Well it just works.

Europe, especially its non-Mediterranean part, is boring in this sense (everything is kinda OK but mostly not that fun)

I think there’s truth in this, but the factors behind it are tricky. Unlike something like bread, it’s not easy for consumers to actively choose good plumbing over bad plumbing.

Installing new plumbing is something you do very rarely. Most often it’s done by a developer rather than the person who will actually live in a property. And when you’re buying or renting a property, plumbing quality is lower priority than other factors, notably price and location.

So developers go for the cheapest option they can get away with, property owners don’t necessarily like it but don’t push back enough because they have bigger concerns, and the result is that most plumbing is low quality.

Even if you yourself are the developer, it’s hard to ensure decent quality unless you spend a lot of money, do a lot of research, have a lot of time available, or ideally all three.

I’ve learned this to my own cost - on a renovation project, we ended up with some crappy fittings and crappy installation because we didn’t manage it closely enough and the builders don’t care. I would like nice stuff, but how do I get it?

Edit to clarify: I think building standards are driven much more by builders than by homeowners. I’d like to know more about the driving factors - is it purely a matter of cost? I hope not, because that suggests everything everywhere will inevitably become crap.

Less profit, though still plenty of it, can be made from high-quality goods. It's not that profit is inherently wrong, rather it's widespread business and corporate attitudes. An obsession with numbers and statistics rather than any pride in work.

Where in the US? First mistake is acting as if a house built in northern California is representative of a house built in rural Maine, or suburban Texas.

If you think it's remotely monolithic, it absolutely isn't. But there's definitely a pattern of lower quality building in very high-growth, high cost of living areas where the property's value isn't related much to the building, but mostly reflective of the land and it's location.

I lived in a very expensive, up scale apartment in Japan, and everything in it was very poor quality in comparison to the quality of my (not mcmansion) house in the US. My doors are good quality, plumbing works fine, furniture is much nicer and less expensive by an order of magnitude.

I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldis, and certainly you can get fresh fish more easily at the corner grocery in Japan, but otherwise the selection is better even at Aldis than at most groceries in Japan. There's nothing like a Wegmans or a Harris Teeter in Japan at all that I ever saw -- maybe somewhere upscale in Tokyo or something.

I was always left with the impression that everything in Europe except for trains and windows (why do Europeans have such nice windows and we do not?!?) is rundown crap.

I’m not saying I’m necessarily objectively correct. But I’m definitely not endorsing your subjective impression, either.

1.) Much of the housing in Silicon Valley was built in the 1950s and 60s by a wave of migrants coming to work in the nascent defense & semiconductor industries there, sometimes with their own hands. They'd go to the hardware store, buy some lumber and build a house, something you definitely can't do today. Oftentimes they were in a rush to do so because they'd just taken a job in the area and were otherwise living in a tent. Of the ones that are professionally built, they were often quickly mass-produced to keep up with the flood of new migrants.

2.) There are a variety of disincentives to upgrading your house from the original build: you have to bring it up to the (now vastly upgraded) building codes, you need to deal with the year-long permitting process, you often need to get written permission from your neighbors if you're doing something big like adding a second story or rebuilding the house, you may lose your Prop 13 grandfathering if the value changes significantly. That's why you end up with ridiculous situations where the land under your house is worth $1.5M and the structure is worth $100K.

3.) California has forgiving weather. You can get away with stupid stuff like having doors & windows that don't completely seal, no heating (let alone air conditioning), no basements, etc.

4.) California has unforgiving natural disasters. Between earthquakes, wildfires, termites, mudslides, and floods, it's often not worth sinking a lot into your primary residence if it's just gonna get destroyed with the next earthquake anyway.

I lived in Massachusetts before California and there were houses in my town still standing from the 1700s. They were a bit drafty since they still had the original windows from then, but the build quality was a lot better than what you see in California.

These differences shape all of our opinions, whether it's you visiting the US, or me visiting the EU. Don't assume that your values are as equally important to someone in the US as they are to you, though. Many of our cultural preferences are just that -- preferences -- which all come with an associated set of pros and cons.

One person's "crappy hollow-core door" is another persons "ADA accessible, 2018 IRC-compliant, lead-free, contemporary-style door".

I have no issues with E Porsche. Good for them and their fans. I hope they sell as many as you can even if they take all Tesla customers that overlap. But Porsche only sold 256,255 cars last year after decades of existence since they target a certain clientele. Tesla will surpass that this year in volume.

Those Buicks having major transmission problems within the first year of ownership would have been considered a disaster even in 1969. Same with Ford's powershift transmissions from a few years ago that tended to last ~25K miles.

According to Wikipedia [1]:

> Toyota has a large presence in the United States with six major assembly plants in Huntsville, Alabama, Georgetown, Kentucky, Princeton, Indiana, San Antonio, Texas, Buffalo, West Virginia, and Blue Springs, Mississippi.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota#North_America

American cars are usually more powerful but are much heavier and a bit sluggish on controls.

The engine is usually smooth and powerful, cabin comfort, the ride very quiet, it sort of glides with you.

While I did not drive that many American cars, but I loved renting Chevy Impala, larger Fords

Because those that buy second-hand hear how much trouble a given OEMs vehicles will likely be to own. If they become money-sinks, then after-market value will plummet. If they become worthless on the second-hand market, either consumers will hang onto them longer (encountering the problems themselves), or they'll become less popular to buy first-hand (because they are difficult to sell for a worth-while price).