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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

#71

Post by afarrell »

ralfd wrote: post #46
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…

> The UX is awful Wait, what UX does a fridge need? Mine just has a scroll wheel which goes from cool to cold.

One important user interaction for a fridge is that when the door is open you grasp the handle and push toward to the body of the fridge, three things happen:

1) The door glides smoothly on its hinge toward the body.

2) The door connects with the body and provides haptic feedback that it is closed

3) The door remains closed.

The last one is the most important because user will likely walk away and stop monitoring the state of the fridge. If it changes to an open-state, it could remain open and thereby let the food inside spoil.

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

#72

Post by repsilat »

tim333 wrote: post #25
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…

In the US the power of large corporations seems to have run amok a bit allowing them to foist crappy bread, chocolate etc. In Europe things are more regulated and it seems easier for local producers to not be wiped out by the large corporates. I think the US need some political reform so it's less easy to buy political influence.

> foist crappy bread

A more charitable interpretation is "American consumers care more about price than quality."

Or perhaps it's a market for lemons. American consumers don't know which products are of good quality, and don't want to pay extra for the same quality, so they buy cheap to not be taken advantage of.

There is nothing stopping people from making good bread and chocolate in the US, and many do. They would/will succeed in the market if the demand is there. Trouble is, even though people will tell you they're willing to pay a bit more for nice things, for the most part those preferences don't come out where it matters -- in supermarket aisles.

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

#73

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

tim333 wrote: post #44

A lot of the issues may come down to whether management prioritize financial engineering / making huge bonuses / pleasing wall street vs making good vehicles. The same with Boeing - they used to be run by engineers who wanted to make great planes and then the shifted control to finance guys in Chicago who wanted to make big profits. You see the effect a bit with Tesla where I'm sure Musk would love to focus on qualit…

I worked for years as an engineer and manager at a legendary Japanese corporation, known for their quality.

It was a frustrating experience. Their obsession with quality made even the smallest tasks difficult and tedious. 3,000-line testing spreadsheets, where even one failure pooched the whole deal.

But you can’t argue with the results.

Good quality is difficult and tedious. I like to think that the work I do is of exceptional quality, but I am often met with outright hostility by American engineers, when I talk about my methodology.

I’m not being snooty, or projecting onto others. I’m merely talking about what I do, and I’m treated as if I’m eating a ham sandwich in Temple.

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

#74

Post by patrickk »

The_Double wrote: post #22
arethuza wrote: post #3

I must admit that's not what I expected - I've seen it repeatedly asserted that electric cars are so much simpler than ICE cars that their reliability should be much higher (which does seem reasonable to me). Mind you - its over twenty years since I've had an engine/transmission problem with a car (plenty of other faults - but not with those components) - maybe I've been lucky though.

Most of Tesla's problems seem related to the other parts of the car: doors, seats, suspension, etc. They are probably the best electric powertrain company in the world, but still not that great at being a car company.

A lot of those parts are from third party suppliers (not that it excuses Tesla completely of course). I watched a video some time ago, where Musk was complaining that the big automotive parts suppliers simply didn't take Tesla seriously, and therefore it led to quality issues, in the video it was the quality of the sun flaps. It's probably due to Tesla shipping much lower volumes, and the big suppliers not being familiar with dealing with a supplier that has low volumes but aims to be a mass market car maker.

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

#75

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

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) bread daily, and a lot of grocery stores have an in-house bakery as well nowadays if you want to go super fancy. (I'm sure that's a logistical optimization as well, that is, dough or its components are easier to transport than ready-made bread, especially because some (like croissants) are very fragile).

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

#76

Post by StreamBright »

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.

Exactly. People in Germany think that if your train is late it is the end of the world. Their trains and subways tend to be very clean and punctual, yet very affordable. In the US this is not true. BART in SF nowhere near to the quality of service in Munich.

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

#77

Post by brightball »

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…

Shiny sounds right. In my experience with appliances in the US people either get the cheapest option or the option that matches the design of their home the best.

You hear people wanting stainless steel appliances...but never discussing their quality.

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

#78

Post by mantoto »

lnsru wrote: post #33
kstenerud wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Our subway is good. I'm using it every day and just because one train is canceled doesn't mean anything because 10 minutes later the next one comes

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

#79

Post by Luc »

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…

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.

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

#80

Post by Someone1234 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #48
eej71 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember thumbing through the CR car ratings book in the early 1980s and the track record of American cars was terrible (by comparison) even then. The Japanese cars were consistently good. So I don't think it's 30 years of wage stagnation either.

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 and they'll be described as unreliable foreign cars.

The real mystery is why Americans still buy American made cars. The foreign competition has eclipsed them for whole generations at this point, but yet demand remains.

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