Lexus and Toyota Together Capture 11 of 19 Initial Quality Model Awards

I'm unfamiliar with the concept of "problems per 100" - is 91 a good thing? To me, it sounds like it would be possible for 91% of the cars to have a problem and still achieve that rating.

 

Linky no worky. http://www.jdpower.com/corporate/news/rele....asp?ID=2006082 seems to be correct.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(galaxee @ Jun 7 2006, 08:24 PM) [snapback]267689[/snapback]</div>

No, this study is for the 1st 90 days. If you read the press release, they've also changed the methodology.

In the past, I've found JD's studies to be a little bogus because some vehicles have done poorly due to things like wind noise (err, if it's not a defect and they're all that way.... is that really a problem and/or defect?) or fuel economy (well, if you bought a big SUV, of course fuel economy sucks). 90 days is also too short and many brands which have done will in the IQS have not done well in their "long term" (3 year) studies which to me, isn't near long enough. What % of people get rid of their cars after 3 years? How many people buy used cars >3 years old?

Here are two examples of things that Nissan supposedly did to improve "perceived quality" from http://www.nissannews.com/site_library/cor...speech-1.shtml:
"So we’re constantly reviewing technologies, processes, organizations – everything – to maintain and improve on our well-deserved reputation for quality. We listen to our customers . . . we listen to our suppliers . . . and we listen to our employees. We ask questions, we evaluate and we analyze on our way to improving the quality of our vehicles – whether actual or perceived quality.

For instance, we’re adding more lumbar support to our Frontier truck seats because customers told us that was a quality problem. We also heard that the lack of a map lights in some Sentra models was a quality problem. Maybe that’s not a real quality issue, but for a consumer who wants a map light, it becomes one. So we’re adding map lights across the board in our entry-level sedan."

edit: I found some more info and some useful charts at http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic.../606080384/1148.