Are they made with the same quality of materials as older, more reliable versions? I would guess no. It's also a poor comparison because both are low tech products.
side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that fled the 1917 revolution, worked in Paris and settled in Switzerland inbetween the world wars.