For autos, ‘quality’ is in the eye of the beholder

Dan Carney • E-mail

Is a bit of grimy brake dust on a car’s wheels as serious a quality defect as a blown engine? The widely respected J.D. Power Vehicle Dependability Study thinks so, rating cars’ dependability based on factors such as brake dust, wind noise and placement of radio knobs.

This may come as news to consumers who probably expect that “dependability” means what the industry refers to as “things gone wrong,” such as a blown engine, leaking transmission, or a heater that won’t.

As economic considerations encourage consumers to look harder at domestic brands they may have avoided in recent years, shoppers anxiously consult the myriad quality ratings available in an effort to avoid buying a lemon. But doing so can be so confusing that quality scores may not provide the desired assurance. Cars that score well on one rating fare poorly on another.

The issue here is what factors consumers think contribute to quality rankings, and what factors are actually used. Does having to hose off dusty wheels every so often really put a car’s reliability on the same level with another car that may have stranded its driver at the side of a dangerous highway with an engine failure?

“In our measure, brake dust is a thing gone wrong,” explained Dave Sargent, vice president of automotive research for J.D. Power and Associates. “The consumers who report this as a problem do believe this is a defect,” he said.

“They clearly consider it to be a quality problem in their definition, which might be different from an engineer's definition,” Sargent added.

“It is weighed the same as engine failure,” by J.D. Power’s dependability study, Sargent acknowledged.

Many different ratings
But car shoppers looking at reliability ratings may expect that a top rating means that the car doesn’t break and that a low rating indicates that a door is apt to fall off.

Adding to the confusion is the proliferation of quality and satisfaction ratings, each looking at some different aspect of owners’ satisfaction with their cars. J.D. Power alone offers the Initial Quality Study (which looks at the first 90 days of ownership), the Vehicle Dependability Study (which looks at the first three years of ownership) and the APEAL study (which looks at cars’ performance, execution and layout of controls). Competitors such as Strategic Vision offer ratings like the Total Quality Index, which examines the buying, owning and driving experience, and breaks out winners by product segment.

Land Rover trumpets its victory in the Strategic Vision TQI in the luxury utility segment, in which it was the most improved brand and the highest-scoring. But Land Rover was next to last in the J.D. Power IQS report, sandwiched between smart and Mini.

Of the bottom six brands in IQS, three are the world’s premiere off-road brands, Hummer, Jeep and Land Rover, and the other three are European boutique brands with enthusiastic followings — all exactly the kinds of products that score well in other measures of customer satisfaction.

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