Reliability by brand cars 1 to 4 years old
- Thread starter chaparral
- Start date
Soldato
Alfa doing well is nice to see.
Permabanned
the more poopy city cars you make the better your reliability score?
Soldato
I'm not so sure electric cars will be the future. You're pushing the power generation problem onto the national grid which wouldn't be able to cope by a huge margin.
I suppose mainstream electric cars are a new thing (albeit the first electric car was >100 years ago) and petrol/diesel cars have the benefit of 100 years of constant evolutionary design to get 'right'...even though there are plenty of arguments can be made here about extreme complexity in the last 10 years for emission purposes.
The VW group always tells the tale of these...
Most components shared across platforms with some cost saving going on further down the brands you go.
Yet this would have us believe that the reliability stats favour the cheapest brands? I don't buy it.
I think there is simply more acceptance of minor faults on cheaper cars.
Most components shared across platforms with some cost saving going on further down the brands you go.
Yet this would have us believe that the reliability stats favour the cheapest brands? I don't buy it.
I think there is simply more acceptance of minor faults on cheaper cars.
Also something I have no idea about
How safe or dangerous are the batteries in electric cars if you have a bad crash or in a car pile up
Don
I wouldn’t read too much into it from an electric car situation, more the build quality of Tesla - weren’t they building Model 3s in the factory car park at one point (or was that an urban myth?)
Soldato
Very valid point. Due to the high price of batteries I can see people trying to perform a DIY fix on them as 'I will just top up the battery water like I did on my old Mondeo'
....then giving themselves a 10,000 Volt shock.
Don
Less to go wrong on a cheap car to be honest.
Would have thought Honda would have done better, slipped down the list there I think.
But how much less in reality is there to go wrong on an Octavia than a Leon, than a Golf than an A3?
Sure there are a few extra toys as you go up (though perhaps not as many as people might assume these days) but underneath the mechanicals of these cars don't differ all that much.
I'm not convinced a Skoda is inherently more reliable than an Audi, when compared to the likelihood an Audi owner is going to take his car back to Audi to sort a funny noise that the Skoda owner just ignores.
Soldato
This just isn't true, the national grid has said many times that they are well prepared for a full EV future and see no issues.
Don
A lot of it could even be due to the assembly plant being different and having different cultures as to what is tolerable to put out the door.
I like to see the mileage these car brands have covered
I can't see the average Hyundai, Suzuki etc driver doing the same kind mileage per year as the BMW, Audi etc drivers
Soldato
Overall I agree, but it would need to be time specific. Everyone arriving home at 5:30PM and plugging in their electric car would have an enormous increase in peak power demand. I should have worked my post about peak demand not total oops!
But surely you'd expect to see Skoda as the brand happy to kick out a few Friday afternoon specials, not Audi?
Soldato
It's worth digging a bit deeper into where these statistics actually come from. There's been plenty of discussion surrounding this from a Tesla perspective since the survey results surfaced last year. Per Tesla:
"Only 28 Model S owners responded out of a total of 18,000 car owners surveyed by What Car?
That’s less than 0.3% of UK Tesla owners, so this survey is statistically meaningless."
The Model 3 is also a simpler vehicle and reports suggest the quality control has improved significantly since it was first introduced. I won't pretend Tesla's customer service is wonderful in the UK or they aren't overwhelmed with the growth, but I don't think you should put too much weight on this What Car survey either.
"Only 28 Model S owners responded out of a total of 18,000 car owners surveyed by What Car?
That’s less than 0.3% of UK Tesla owners, so this survey is statistically meaningless."
The Model 3 is also a simpler vehicle and reports suggest the quality control has improved significantly since it was first introduced. I won't pretend Tesla's customer service is wonderful in the UK or they aren't overwhelmed with the growth, but I don't think you should put too much weight on this What Car survey either.
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I guess there's some truth in these stats but as a few others have said you have to factor in that :-
1) People buying cheaper (supermini/city cars) are going to be less critical than people buying £50k+ premium brands
2) Generally the more expensive a car the more advanced the technology/engineering and hence the me to go wrong with it!
So brands that primarily produce and sell cheaper/simpler cars are always going to rate higher in surveys.
I'm sure it's no shock to anyone that a new brand like Tesla selling £100k+ super advanced electric cars is the least reliable one!
Agreed, that's an utterly worthless sample size. I'm surprised they even included it when they had so little data?
1) People buying cheaper (supermini/city cars) are going to be less critical than people buying £50k+ premium brands
2) Generally the more expensive a car the more advanced the technology/engineering and hence the me to go wrong with it!
So brands that primarily produce and sell cheaper/simpler cars are always going to rate higher in surveys.
I'm sure it's no shock to anyone that a new brand like Tesla selling £100k+ super advanced electric cars is the least reliable one!
Agreed, that's an utterly worthless sample size. I'm surprised they even included it when they had so little data?
Don
Absolutely! But it’s a funny old world and I don’t think the German reputation for engineering prowess/efficiency and what not is one that’s reflected in reality.But surely you'd expect to see Skoda as the brand happy to kick out a few Friday afternoon specials, not Audi?
Soldato
That's not how statistics work though? If there's only a 1000 Tesla owners in the UK compared to a 100,000 Skoda owners, only 28 Tesla responses is perfectly valid if only 2800 Skoda owners responded also. It might not be 100% reflective of reality, but it doesn't invalidate the results so long as the overall sample is normally distributed.
In fact it's likely that much less than 0.3% of owners of other cars responded to this survey, because people just don't respond in general, to any survey.