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Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

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Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#111

Post by _iyig »

Someone1234 wrote: post #50
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

American bread is particularly problematic as someone that moved from Europe. Until I found bread I liked I'd often joke that it was suitable for storage in a bomb shelter since it has an unnatural shelf-life and tastes like it. After a tedious search, we wound up buying $2.60 "Sara Lee Artesano Style Bread" which is still less good than a 70c loaf of Hovis in the UK, and certainly less good than fresh made French br…

The trick to finding real bread in the U.S. is to skip the “bread aisle” in grocery stores like Safeway. Instead, look to shelves in the bakery section for fresh-baked, un-sliced whole loaves of bread without sugar added.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#112

Post by mariorossi666 »

kstenerud wrote: post #2

It's interesting to note the difference in communication styles when company PR teams respond to requests for comments. Fiat Chrysler and Chevy both responded in predictable marketroid speak, complete with extensive use of passive voice and grand, hand-wavey platitudes "We care committed to blah blah blah" "Quality is of the greatest importance blah blah blah" "blah blah above industry average blah blah blah" "blah b…

> "This particular issue was for this particular year, and has long since been fixed."

On the other hand, you don't have to fix a problem you haven't created.

Most of Tesla problems are self inflicted.

Moreover "Model X vehicles today is 3.5 times better than the quality of brand new Model X cars from 2015."

According to which metric?

It sounds a lot like "this is the fastest Mac ever built, 2.5x faster than the previous generation"[1] but on the market cheaper or faster options (or both) were already available.

[1] in small writings "according to bench X and taking the best result. On average the improvement is about +0.3%"

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#113

Post by ensiferum »

Hendrikto wrote: post #60
lnsru wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure in Leipzig is awesome because it was newly created after joining Western Germany for the money from westerners. Infrastructure in Western Germany is crap! My wife uses subway in Munich and there is no week without complaining about delayed or canceled trains. Buildings of universities in Western Germany is a bad joke. University in Regensburg was literally collapsing while one in Dresden got many new b…

> My wife uses subway in Munich and there is no week without complaining about delayed or canceled trains. At least there is public transportation at all, unlike in the US.

You could say that not having public transportation is better than having crappy public transportation. And I'm not talking about some occasional hiccup but the fact is that Deutsche Bahn operated trains are an enormous shit show. They are constantly late or even cancelled. You buy a ticket for a train and few mins before the train is supposed to arrive the board will say "zug fellt aus" (train cancelled). Have fun waiting 20-40 mins for the next one. If you have to be somewhere on time then you're going to have look for an alternative way of transport and you have practically no recourse for recouping the cost of your wasted ticket money.

Now if the public transportation didn't exist you'd just shrug and go by your car saving yourself a whole bunch of stress and fist clenching and cursing.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#114

Post by contravariant »

kstenerud wrote: post #16
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

I'm inclined to agree. I've lived in Japan (5 years), in San Francisco (6 years), and now live in Germany. The food quality goes Europe -> Japan -> USA, with a sharp drop between Japan and the USA. I'm currently living in Leipzig, which still has bombed-out looking empty buildings from the time of the Iron Curtain (although things have finally been picking up over the past few years). And yet even here the infrastruc…

Interesting, I was under the impression that the food quality in Japan was quite good. Although I suppose I have no reason to believe Europe would be any worse, or different.

What makes you say that Europe has a better food quality?

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#115

Post by juskrey »

rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

This is not true. America is highly non homogenous, and looks like you did not bother to find "something else". If you seek long enough, you can find the worse but also the best things in the world here, including houses, people, politicians, bread, vegetables, meat, businesses, service, amenities and so on.

Europe, especially its non-Mediterranean part, is boring in this sense (everything is kinda OK but mostly not that fun)

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#116

Post by thdrdt »

This is why I think Tesla will have a hard time when most manufacturers are creating EVs. In Europe we are already seeing that a lot of Tesla owners are turning to Porsche.

The build quality is just sad for such an expensive car. Wind blowing into the side window!? Ok, they will fix it over time, but I'm just flabbergasted they shipped those cars.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#117

Post by Someone1234 »

cobbzilla wrote: post #93
Someone1234 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American bread is particularly problematic as someone that moved from Europe. Until I found bread I liked I'd often joke that it was suitable for storage in a bomb shelter since it has an unnatural shelf-life and tastes like it. After a tedious search, we wound up buying $2.60 "Sara Lee Artesano Style Bread" which is still less good than a 70c loaf of Hovis in the UK, and certainly less good than fresh made French br…

You’re shopping at the wrong places. There is good bread out there. For better or worse, a lot of Americans like fluffy white bread that’s loaded with preservatives to give it a long shelf life. That’s what they ate as kids & they’ve never branched out. I’m not defending US mass market bread, but I do think it’s largely a matter of differing tastes and values. Your comment (and much of this thread) comes off as “I ha…

I was comparing supermarket breads in Europe and the US. So while I may be shopping in the "wrong" places in the US that doesn't really detract from my overarching point. A lot of people, in both areas, buy their bread at supermarkets.

If supermarkets don't offer good products, that may also be a discussion worth having.

> I have different values, I don’t understand mainstream American values in this or that regard so let me tell you why they suck and why we’re better than you

But this critique doesn't address why the price is higher. You can call it "values" if you want but ultimately we're talking about a lower quality product at a higher price and shoppers that likely don't know they have other choices/are getting a worse product.

> So yeah, it’s flame-baity & perhaps even unkind.

I feel like attempting to place words into my mouth ("why they suck and why we’re better than you") that don't remotely match my tone or substance of my post and then calling it "unkind" is a much larger departure from expected decorum than anything I actually posted above.

To quote the site's guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Re-stated my argument in a much more negative and judgemental way then attacking it doesn't feel like a good faith argument or trying to argue the strongest interpretation but YMMV.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#118

Post by VintageCool »

Someone1234 wrote: post #80
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. Those of us “of a certain age” will remember that this is not new at all. I can’t speculate on the reasons, but I agree about standard quality levels being higher in Japan and Western Europe; but so are costs.

I'd speculate that it is because people still buy them regardless. That may sound overly simplistic but I think there's an element of truth to it. Foreign vehicle companies needed to fight to gain market share in the US, often needing to be much better just to be compared as equals. Look at KIA recently doing so, now they're doing very well reliability wise and offer a substantial free warranty, but ask random people…

Americans generally don't buy American cars, right? We buy American-made trucks.

The US imposed a 25% tax on imported light trucks and has for decades (the "chicken tax"). I think that this has resulted in a weird distortion where American auto makers focus heavily on that one more profitable market segment, and advertise most heavily on that one market segment, and have done so for generations.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#119

Post by systemtest »

mcny wrote: post #92
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same in the UK, where most of the bread you can get is basically intended for a toaster. But, it's down to volume and consumption; in my country (NL), bread is a daily staple, often featured in two meals a day - so a family will easily go through a loaf a day. It makes more sense to optimize the production and logistics for a shelf life of days instead of weeks. We can get reasonably fresh (factory-produced)…

I bought some bread from Safeway earlier this year in August. I called the number on the package when the bread started to mould within four days of me buying it. Outside of New York City area, I wouldn't think of doing groceries more than once a week. The place I've lived at are all terrible in terms of how grocery stores are walkable.

Here in the Netherlands I believe bread also starts to mould after four days. My solution is to have a stockpile in the freezer.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#120

Post by LeonidasXIV »

atq2119 wrote: post #69
lnsru wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure in Leipzig is awesome because it was newly created after joining Western Germany for the money from westerners. Infrastructure in Western Germany is crap! My wife uses subway in Munich and there is no week without complaining about delayed or canceled trains. Buildings of universities in Western Germany is a bad joke. University in Regensburg was literally collapsing while one in Dresden got many new b…

At least there are trains... and Munich in particular is slightly weird in that the subway (U-Bahn) is run by a municipal company and works very reliably given the amount of people they're moving, while the suburban trains (S-Bahn) are run by Deutsche Bahn and are often a mess at rush hour. In part that's due to the design flaw of having a massive central bottleneck. Similarly for universities, the quality differs. G…

> Generally, I feel like all these complaints need to be measured against what the alternative is. Which cities have a busy subway system where commuters aren't complaining?

Literally any city in Asia (or at least Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, whose subway company has now branched out to run subways in many parts of the world like Stockholm). In one year of living in Nagoya the subway was late once.

That said it has a way more sensible layout than Munich where one failure in a central point does not cascade to paralyze the entire rest of the network. It is not the worst of course, since it is pretty extensive, but routing nearly every single line through Hbf or Sendlinger Tor couldn't ever have been a good idea.

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