Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jalopnik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 475 posts

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

#371

Post by epistasis »

ken wrote: post #363

Isn't this just stack ranking? Hasn't that always been a terrible way to measure quality? Every car, especially American makes, are drastically improved from even just a few years ago. Being in the bottom half in 2019 is a completely different story from being in the bottom half in 1999, or 1969.

The dynamics of how to evaluate a team of people that work together are quite different from ranking the quality of competitors in an industry. The reasons that stack ranking is bad don't really apply to choosing your next car manufacturer or to evaluating the relative health of US car companies versus others.

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

#372

Post by smt88 »

ken wrote: post #363

Isn't this just stack ranking? Hasn't that always been a terrible way to measure quality? Every car, especially American makes, are drastically improved from even just a few years ago. Being in the bottom half in 2019 is a completely different story from being in the bottom half in 1999, or 1969.

As a consumer, I don’t really care how cars compare to 1999 equivalents. I care how they compare now.

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

#373

Post by novok »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #367
anon73044 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll call you anecdote with one of my own. I've put the same 40,000 miles in the same 5 years on my '01 GMC Sierra and have had no issues besides a power steering pump when I bought it and regular maintenance. I'll probably sell it after New year's and I'm not sure if it's a quirk in my area, the going rate is the same as what I paid 5 years ago. A regular maintenance schedule does wonders for the reliability of a ve…

>A regular maintenance schedule does wonders for the reliability of a vehicle. So much this. I have an entire fleet (7) of 25+yo shitboxes including three of one model (so my observations are fairly scientific). Amount of shit that breaks is proportional to how hard of a life each vehicle lived regardless of brand. Toyota and Honda cost a little more up front and they don't do crazy financing deals so the people with…

I think how well a used car was treated over the years is definitely a true thing, but if you look at the stats for luxury cars, you do see that the Mercedes, BMW, Porsche & high end VW cars break down more than the equivalent Acura or Lexus cars in the first 5-10 years of life.

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

#374

Post by briandear »

iainmerrick wrote: post #103
gnosek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Poland the in-house bakery in a grocery store is the cheap and convenient way to get bread if you can't be bothered to get actual quality (not made from deeply frozen dough). So if the Polish baseline is super fancy for NL, NL is better than UK and UK baseline is artisanal US bread, I wonder what baseline US bread looks like. It's made of sponge and sugar?

It's made of sponge and sugar? Yes, pretty much. It’s very bad.

Good grief. What kind of bread are you buying? I can find terrible bread in Europe too. There is a lot of great bread in the US. People, in these discussions like to take the very worst example of dollar-store bread and compare it to a dedicated boulangerie in Paris, however French supermarket sandwich bread can be just as terrible as the American equivalent. But go to an American bakery and the bread is really good.

It’s popular to characterize American stuff as “bad,” but America is a huge country.

Tortillas in France are pretty terrible and good luck finding a Jalapeño or a Habenero, but in any grocery store in the US, I can find high quality ingredients to make almost anything. Try finding a spice in the average French grocery store any stronger than “hot” Paprika.

These “other countries are better than the US” arguments are ridiculous. In the US, you have access to pretty much anything you want. Mostly not true in many European countries and definitely not true outside the capitals.

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

#375

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Marsymars wrote: post #290
asperous wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to enthusiasts, who are driving for the experience of driving, including the feel, sound, etc

I consider myself an enthusiast, and still consider engine noise to be undesirable. Among various other car things, I'm very enthusiastic for in-car noise cancelling: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/9/18175748/bose-noise-cancel...

>I consider myself an enthusiast, and still consider engine noise to be undesirable.

Same here. That said, the flat 4 has a really nice note (engines with a flat plane crankshaft generally do) so I can understand why people want it to sing when they step on it.

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

#376

Post by FireBeyond »

ChrisClark wrote: post #306
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the grandparent comment was actually talking about the quality of Tesla’s Public Relations department. Otherwise it would strike me as odd that someone would boost a vehicle manufacturer that doesn’t sell spare parts, in a thread on vehicle reliability. Edited a few words to better express my point.

Buy all the spare parts you want here: https://epc.tesla.com Or just walk into a service center. Tesla now undercuts all third party prices on parts.

Have you actually tried this?

The last time I saw that site, every single part down to the simplest screw said "Contact Tesla for pricing" and instead of adding to a cart, it too had a button "Contact Tesla for sales"...

... almost like they were trying to barely scrape by a state mandate on spare parts being available for sale.

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

#377

Post by refurb »

Doubleslash wrote: post #28
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…

German citizen here. I travel to the US quite often - I find that the quality of the Grocery stores is on average one level up. The quality of the goods sold there is another story. But mid-and southern Europe likes it cheap when it comes to these things. There is a reason why we call them "discounters". I really do hear you on the housing quality - it's ridiculous what people are willing to put up with over there. W…

Please don’t use the Bay Area as a proxy for US housing. It’s an extreme outlier.

Million dollars houses would be regarded as unliveable in other parts of the US.

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

#378

Post by NeedMoreTea »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #375
Marsymars wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself an enthusiast, and still consider engine noise to be undesirable. Among various other car things, I'm very enthusiastic for in-car noise cancelling: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/9/18175748/bose-noise-cancel...

>I consider myself an enthusiast, and still consider engine noise to be undesirable. Same here. That said, the flat 4 has a really nice note (engines with a flat plane crankshaft generally do) so I can understand why people want it to sing when they step on it.

I can relate, I love the sound of a flat crank V8. Yet I'd be just as happy experiencing that as a convincing sound effect in the cabin of my EV, or well silenced ICE as actually bothering people in the real world with actually open exhausts.

Given some places are requiring EVs to actually emit a little more sound for the benefit of blind and partially sighted people, I'm surprised we're not moving towards choosing vehicle sound packs along with paint colours...

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

#379

Post by refurb »

Luc wrote: post #79
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…

In a HN thread about bread some time ago, someone living in California protested that one could get top quality European style bread basically everywhere. I looked it up and the bread they recommended comes from a single industrial bakery that supplies the whole state of California. So yeah, there's that thing again where they don't know that better is possible.

Industrial bakers can’t make good bread?

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

#380

Post by refurb »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #282
navigatesol wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was comparing supermarket breads in Europe and the US Every major supermarket I've ever been to in the US and Canada has a million styles of bread, including many freshly baked right there at the store. > but ultimately we're talking about a lower quality product at a higher price Do you have evidence for lower quality, outside of the roundly debunked "shelf life" argument? Or are these your preferences?

A million styles of bad bread in comparison to any one of the cheap loaves available in a German market. In many major US supermarkets, the freshly baked product is worse than the stale packaged product. Try it at your local albertsons or walmart. It's acceptable if you eat it warm and after that you can use it as a sponge to soak up spills. The $7 artisan whatever quarter of a loaf at Whole Foods is maybe in the sam…

I love how long the bread argument thread is getting.

Reminds me of coffee discussions. “Peet’s is good coffee!”, “No it’s shit, you don’t know good coffee!”, “You just have an unsophisticated palate!”.

Post reply on HN