Manufacturing a car involves choreographing hundreds of parts, most of which are created somewhere else, to be at the same spot at the same time for final assembly. Given the widespread adoption of "just in time" manufacturing methodology, it's understandable that with personnel issues affecting all manufacturing during the pandemic, and the resultant cascading supply chain issues, it would take some time for things to return to normal.
As you can see from the chart below, they haven't returned to normal, and almost certainly they are going to get worse before they get better.
It's not just the effects of the Pandemic that are responsible for the doubling of the number of problems per vehicle over the last five years, but the introduction of new technologies which are proving problematic and there are many factors that are influencing this significant deterioration in the quality of output from one of America's largest industries.
Each year American Consumer Research powerhouse J.D. Power publishes its proprietary Initial Quality Study (IQS) on new car brands, basing its score and ranking on the number of problems experienced per 100 new vehicles (PP100) during the first three months of ownership.
The depth and breadth of this industrial-scale research is quite remarkable with the latest poll collecting the detailed experiences of 93,380 purchasers of 2023 model-year vehicles, with each answering a 223-part questionnaire covering every aspect of ownership.
The industry average IQS score for each year since 2010 is the red line on the above chart, and the green line is the annual industry average for the company's Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS) which examines the number of problems experienced during the remainder of the first three years of ownership.
That is, the PP100 figure for the first three months of a car's lifespan (IQS score) needs to be added to the PP100 score from the VDS for the same model year to get the total number of problems experienced by owners in the first 36 months of their car's life on the road ... and that number has already doubled between 2010 and 2021.
Buying a car is an important buying decision, perhaps the the largest financial decision many people will make next to buying a home.
And new cars now have double the number of problems they had in 2010 – with some of the worst offenders averaging more than five quality issues per vehicle for the most recent years in the survey.
Hence it is pretty obvious that there's worse to come, because the IQS runs three years ahead of the VDS, and with the IQS industry average showing reliability is declining, the three year results are likely to bring more of the same increases in problems too.
In J.D. Power's press release for the 2024 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS), it noted that, "historically, VDS model results mirror the results of the respective model year in the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study."
That's right, as once we'd assembled all the data from the press releases issued by J.D. Power for its annual IQS and VDS surveys since 2010, we could see the rate at which problems occurred in the first 90 days and the remainder of three years of ownership for each marque by year, and they don't change much. The average across all automotive marques over the last 12 years shows that 43% of problems occur in the first three months, and 57% of problems appear in the next 33 months. There's slight variation between marques, but we feel certain those chart plots are going much higher yet.
The following chart shows the average number of problems experienced per 100 new vehicles (PP100) during the first three years of ownership by brand name and year, and we feel sure you will find this as fascinating as we did. We've excluded marques for which we do not have a full data set.
The chart reads from the most unreliable brand in the data set which is at the top (Land Rover is at least transparent – there are a lot of marques that won't, don't or can't work with J.D. Power) – to unquestionably the most reliable automotive marque on the planet by a VERY wide margin: Lexus.
Over a quarter century of writing up J.D.Power's press releases, I'd sensed that Lexus (and its parent Toyota) were at the very forefront of reliability, but the raw scores and annual rankings we assembled left no doubt. As a rough rule of thumb from what we've seen so far, Lexus looks to be at least 10% more reliable than any other nameplate over the 12 year period 2010 to 2021.
In the automotive world, quality is governed by design, logistics, managing supply chain chaos, staying at the forefront of desirability ... and Lexus is doing it at least 10% better than any other marque over the last measurable decade to 2021. Its parent company Toyota is also vying with Porsche and Buick for a podium position in quality control for all the credible marques, so something is working.
Just one last point on the above chart - Land Rover, Chrysler, Volvo and Jeep are not the most unreliable brands - this is a relatively small dataset of manufacturers because it's the only data set we have. There are a lot more car makers and the vast majority of them aren't in this data set.
As consumers become armed with better information, they will be better informed to make purchasing decisions for one of the largest purchases they will ever make, and you can see quite clearly from this chart that some model years might be best to avoid if you're looking for a second-hand car.
