Can‘t believe that!
alfa Romeo on 3. place
porsche on 5.
Yeah - weird. The list is a bit topsy-turvy this year. Be interesting to compare it to other publications, but I don't have the time to do that right now.
Yes - the JD Powers list is all about
initial quality, based on number of returns to the dealer within the first 100 days of ownership (if I remember correctly). That is how they publish it each year with results for that same year. It is not a long-term reliability rating.
Long-term reliability can be tricky to evaluate in some vehicle categories. For example, Ford, Chevy, and Ram make heavy duty pickup trucks (e.g. Ford F-250, F-350, and the equivalents from Chevy and Ram). Toyota does not make a heavy duty truck. Work vehicles in America are overwhelmingly heavy duty pickup trucks, as are all the fleet vehicles used in construction, landscaping, etc.. - and Americans don't use vehicles like a Grenadier for work, the way they do in Europe. Work/fleet vehicles get abused; a diesel truck might get left idling all day long at a job site so that it is warm inside the vehicle in the winter, or cool in the summer - when guys go on break; this is disastrous for modern diesel emission systems. People drive fleet vehicles like they are not their own - because usually they are not. But when it comes time to compare reliability, the big three American truck makers get compared to Toyota, and by comparison, there are very few Tundras or Tacomas used in work fleets.
Another category in which long-term reliability can get skewed is comparing a manufacturer like Porsche to Chevy, Ford, etc. Some Porsche are daily driven for sure, but a lot of the higher-end Porsche sports cars are driven only when its nice out, and maybe only on the weekend. These low-mileage vehicles, owned by people who have the money to do all the required maintenance (which prevents problems), get compared to daily drivers that are getting thrashed, and that don't get their oil changed. Porsche often comes out ranked very high in the list of reliability by manufacturer, but if you were to run them the same as a Malibu or Corolla, would that hold true?
I'm not knocking Porsche, or suggesting that there are no differences in quality between brands. There are some pretty obvious differences in quality between brands. But the bottom line is - none of the reliability studies are perfect. The key is to understand what is being evaluated, and how, and whether or not that is actually relevant to you.
