Piston slap issue-”They all do it”

Dexclog

clunk in steering rack-”lube up the I-shaft”

The GM 100K warranty-brought to you by the letters N,P, and F. (No Problem Found)

Frankly the standard Ecotec engine is really a non factor compared to most other inline 4 engines – this is in NVH, power, economy, engine noise, etc. Really the only way the Ecotec engine is laudible for any credit is when you add forced induction. But then you have to consider the competitions other 4 cylinder forced fed engines (these include: Evo IX, A4 2.0T, Neon SRT-4, Mazdaspeed 2.3T, Saab T4, WRX boxer turbo – just to name a few). The US built Ariel Atoms orginially came with Ecotec NA and forced fed 4’s but now they are sold with the Honda CTR engine that they originally were designed for back in the UK.

I’ve yet to drive a CTS with the new v6 – only have driven the CTS V (fun car) – so can’t comment on that one.

That said, I was disappointed to learn recently that my aunt had to fork over $4,000 for a rebuild of her 1999 Northstar engine when a head gasket started to leak. I guess this is the “leaky Northstar” issue mentioned above. Apparently once the head bolts are removed, the sockets are stripped. She was told that this problem is so expensive to fix that she might as well have the engine rebuilt while they were at it.

What’s the genius who was in charge of developing the original Northstar up to these days?

While Honda to be complimented on their engine expertise I have to ask you to seriously consider the LS9 in the ZR1, the 2.0L DI turbo in the Cobalt SS and the Ward’s Top Ten award winning 3.6L V6 in the Cadillac CTS just for starters. These engines not only compete but are recognized in the engineering field as some of the world’s finest. Tom @ GM

Take a any car and its closest competitors – where a car that has problems (either from built quality / materials, warranty coverage, MFGR’s recognition of problems [outside of warranty] and action / inaction to remedy such, design, styling, incentives, risky financing) – these actions by the MFGR will lower the resale price compared to another model that does these things better.

For instance, where the MFGR sold too many cars for the demand either with high rebates or stuffed fleets – when these rental or poorly maintained cars (b/c owners couldn’t afford to buy them let alone maintain them) and abused cars stuff the wholesale / auctions affecting resale value.

I look at the JD Power and other surveys with little guidance towards my next purchase. Instead, I base it off of what the market truly thinks a car is worth.

If you watched the recent Indy 500, you saw 33 identical Honda engines going 500 miles at near 12000 rpm and NOT ONE SINGLE ENGINE PROBLEM. I would love to see Danica wearing a honda t-shirt and tight jeans.

* Quality is what the customer thinks it is … whether that’s the sound of a door slam or how fast a light bulb burns out. JDP tries to capture all of those factors in its various surveys.

* Progress, not perfection. It’s a machine and by definition will never be perfect as long as humans design and build them. But we’ll keep striving for progress, which of the past few years has been steady and real. Even Toyotas and Hondas are not perfect — but they are VERY good, according to customers.

* Any score of any survey that measures PPH (problems per hundred) that has scores under 100 means that, according to those responding to the survey, there are at least some totally problem-free products in the marketplace. Just ten years ago, that was unheard of … for any manufacturer.

* Regardless of any survey or result, if you are having a problem with your car, it’s a problem. How a manufacturer/dealer handles the problem is another opportunity to build brand loyalty. GM dealers routinely score very well in customer satisfaction surveys — and we must.

Bottom line — if you have spent the last ten years with your butt planted in an import, you are shortchanging yourself if you don’t at least consider a new GM product when shopping for your next new car or truck. The folks I’ve put into our cars and trucks have routinely been very surprised at the quality and value they see … “This is a GM?”

Yep — it sure is!

John McDonald
Spokesman, GM Detroit

Assembly often has little to do with it. What specific problems did you have with newer Hondas? Which ones could have been due to faulty assembly?

Engineering and component manufacturing, not final assembly, are the most common sources of problems.

Pch101: I had not realized that JD Power already updated the “circle dots.” Last year these lagged by a few weeks, IIRC.

For the best indication of initial reliability, look at “overall quality mechanical.” Here the CTS got four stars. It’s highest scores were in design.

My older Hondas were great. The newer ones were junk.

I’ve since learned to check the VIN. The good Hondas I owned were all made in Japan. The junk was all made in North America.

It just seems that North Americans simply can not do assembly line work. Regardless of UAW, etc.

I would buy a GM over a North American Honda (etc). If you get the same (lower) quality, might as well pay substantially less.

Otherwise, I will wil only look at cars that are “Made in Japan”. Not the USA, not Canada, not Mexico and sure as hell not China or India.

It’s not outside the realm of possiblity if they’re curving separately for manufacturer vs model; add in weighing and generous rounding.

–

I take that back. It seems they are using both “initial quality” and “performance and design” in the “overall quality” score of each manufacturer

In any case, JDPS is bullshit because I doubt they factor out the self-selective nature of each brand’s customers.

Initial quality my ass.

But then that was the 80’s. I had light bulbs, relays, and fuses burn out all the time on my GM cars of the 70’s and 80’s. Do y’all remember the old mid-80’s Trans Ams with the pop up headlights? Remember that guy driving around town with the T/A with the perpetual “wink” (one light up and the other down)? Yeah, that was me between relay replacements.

Dashboard lights would fail quickly, too. I used to wait for two or three bulbs to burn out in the dashboard before tearing it apart to replace them. While I was in there, I would always go ahead and replace ‘em all to avoid having to break down the dashboard again too soon.

I felt like my dad on Christmas morning trying to find this or that bulb; Need a yellow one. No, that’s a flasher, dammit!

In five years, I’ve only had to replace one tail light bulb in my Prius. And it was easy, too; yay!

-A few years ago, JD Power changed the definition of “quality” as used in the IQS in order to include the user-friendliness of designs and features. The IQS is therefore no longer intended to be just a reliability score.

-Comparing the scores at the brand level with those at the nameplate level reveals incongruities. For example, even though the Cadillac brand gets the highest ranking of 5 stars (on a scale of 2-5), only the CTS received a 5-star rating. (The DTS and STS received 2 stars, while the Escalade and SRX received 4.) How that result turns into a 5-star rating for the brand, when only one of the vehicles received that sort of score, I don’t know, but I can’t see how that makes any sense.

I have no quarrel with JDP per se, but it pays to look at the nameplate scores and to look specifically at the categories that measure reliability for each car, instead of relying upon the “quality” score that includes issues that have nothing to with reliability. The brand-level scores are particularly deceiving.

I see nonfunctioning running lights on all sort of late model lower-end GM vehicles. I had attributed it to GM’s “how much less can we buy them for this week” purchasing policy and the resulting garbage bulbs from Delphi or whoever.

From what I remember of the one I did last year, JD Power puts all sorts of stuff in their survey, most of which seems to be “did you like the car and its features” and only a fairly small portion covered warranty-type issues.

I always enjoy your thoughtful comments.

A question. How do you control for the possibility that you’ll get more responses/sign-ups for your reliability stats from people who’ve had problems with their vehicle? I.e. an availability bias. If you don’t have problems you don’t go looking for someone to tell.

I could probably find this out by reading your site, but anyway I thought I would ask.

cheers

Malcolm

The problem people have with JD power is that it’s being used to mislead people.

Tho to be fair, that is kind of the point of marketing.

I agree with your instinct… Initial quality tends to uncover fit and finish type issues, while the long-term studies tend to expose design flaws (e.g., GM piston slap, VW window regulators, Honda/Acura V6 transmissions).

I’d prefer to see the XF at the three-year (or five/six-year) mark before passing judgment on its overall quality.

I like JD Power’s VDS better than their IQS, but it’d be really nice to see data on the first few years a car is out of warranty. How frequent, severe, and costly are the repairs then, and how long on average does an owner tend keep the car at that point, as compared with other vehicles?

Having quality that’s as good as your competition is certainly a good thing, but it’s not very compelling (i.e. Not good enough.) Having pissed off a whole generation of car buyers who vowed to never buy a GM car again, you need to actually be better than the competitors the (Old) “Bad GM” drove them to. The quality gap may be history, but the scars remain; tell me what you’re doing to WIN, tell me what you’re doing that would make me want to dump the car maker that provided a reliable trouble free ownership experience. Many owners left GM for a good reason, now it’s up to you to provide a compelling reason to return.

Also, Buickman is 90% right. He forgot to include “Will it carry my shit and will its features make my neighbors jealous” the rest is accurate. Customers couldn’t give a damn about compression ratios or torsion beam suspension or this or that as long as they think they’re getting a good deal.

The big threes problem is not that they aren’t good cars is that people think they suck. Whether they suck or not is what really matters.