Toyota's Lexus Tops Dependability Study

Yahoo! Finance:Associated Press ^ | 8/9/2006 | Sarah Karush

[KYGrandma]

Pay the fee and get a great rating.

You are sure right on that. As a Ford "wife", we don't give any attention to anything JDPower's recommends.

[eraser2005]

True...

But that's also a common flaw of any of these surveys.

Consumer Reports just asks owners the following:

"If you had any problems with your car in the last year (April 1, 2005 through March 31, 2006) that you considered SERIOUS because of cost, failure, safety or downtime, click the appropriate box(es) for each car. INCLUDE problems covered by warranty. DO NOT INCLUDE 1) problems resulting from accident damage; or 2) replacement of normal maintenance items (brake pads, batteries, mufflers) unless they were replaced much sooner or more often than expected."

Nowhere do they define serious. Nor do they define what a normal lifespan for maintenance items is. Nowhere do they allow you to report how many times it needed repair in that year.

So for 1998, a more common problem with the Ford Taurus was failure of the transmission range sensor. This was a $79 repair. Also for 1998, a common problem with the Honda Accord was failure of the automatic transmission, a $3429 repair. Both get counted equally, and both can be considered serious by their owners, when they clearly are not equal problems.

In any case, the VDS does not determine satisfaction. It just reports the number of problems reported by owners. Its flaw, as you say, is in not weighting seriousness and investigating owners claims (and people make absurd claims sometimes)....

[Protagoras]

The incident was long ago. The warranty was not extended, it was standard, albeit a sales promotion for one or two years as memory serves.

The belt was relatively inexpensive, but the design was goofy (IMO) and it was long in the extreme and wrapped around every part of the engine possible. (I exaggerate for effect)

Because of the design, the labor involved was extensive, which is where the cost added up. The warranty was "bumper to bumper" and I'm sure they would never have included the belt if they knew the frequency of failure. However, in order to not be excluded, it needed to be specifically listed, and it was not.

The company did not live up to it's own written warranty and because of that you can tell the character of the management. They suck. Anyone who buys a Ford should know that they will get reneged on if push comes to shove.