J.D. Power Bought by XIO Group; Deal Appears to Have High Initial Quality

Welp... there goes their vaunted, so-called product neutrality. They might make good competition for CR though; that brand's lack of neutrality has become obvious over the last few years.

@Vulpine There is no such thing as true neutrality. Even opinion comes with a slant, a bias. Whether its political commentary, a movie critic or CR car reviews, we strive to understand the bias of the source so we can discern the information valuable to us. For me, a car review should focus on the seat comfort, function of the AC, and how well its screwed together. For most of the TTAC readers its how brown it is, if its a diesel, can I buy it used for $2000 and drive it for 250K miles with only oil changes. Neither viewpoint means the other has no relevance nor that it lacks any valuable insight.

I look at multiple sources of durability information as part of the decision making process. I tend to keep vehicles a long time so it pays off to do some research. If I was looking for a frivolous toy as opposed to something I actually need then these sort of ratings might not carry as much weight. Fortunately for car companies most people don't look at these ratings. OOOhhh.........shiny........ looks fast........ is about as thorough as it gets.

@Lou_BC "Fortunately for car companies most people don’t look at these ratings." And some of us are as skeptical of this "ratings" company as we are of the product. As with Consumers' Reports. Remember their (politically-based) damning of the Omnirizon? What came of THAT? It was, by today's standards, a very-mediocre car; but the flaw those goofballs asserted, with stamped feet, that the car had...simply didn't exist. Some ad brings out those silly award, I inwardly nod. "That's nice."

@Vulpine As both a TTAC B&B member in mediocre standing and a longtime CR subscriber, I'm tired of this fundamental misunderstanding of CR's auto reliability ratings. Yes, CR has opinions. And no, they're not intellectually "neutral," although they are the only automotive publication anywhere that is entirely free of accepting money from auto industry sponsors. (The fraudulent and money-grabbing "Consumer Guide," with its deliberately confusion-inducing plagiarism of CR's "Best Buy" appellation, has sleazily borrowed against the credibility of this aspect of CR's auto ratings for decades.) But there are two separate ratings CR creates: their own subjective ratings of a car, and the long-term itemized frequency-of-repair scores reported by their readers in the CR Reliability Survey. I have never seen a shred of evidence for all the dark conspiracy theories about how CR supposedly doctors or lies about those survey results. I find CR and Michael Karesh's True Delta the most useful survey results in the industry -- eons ahead of J.D. Power, because they provide information beyond the first 3 months or 1 year of ownership. In that regard, J.D. is… sorry… powerless to help me.

@JustPassinThru Exactly what "political" reason did CR have to give the Omnirizon a poor review?

@tonycd Tony CD, FYI, JD Power also does a 3 year survey which is very informative, and certainly thrashes the dominant TTAC B&B narrative. The latest one showed that the overall spread between best and worse is very narrow (2 to 1), and that 'lemon' brands such as Fiat can be better than blue chip brands like Nissan.

@tonycd My problem with CR's "Reliability Survey" is that they tend to get only the bad reports as people who are satisfied with their cars tend to simply not respond. Remember, all such responses are voluntary and not everybody, not even a majority, have the time or the inclination to respond to all the polls they receive in mail or email. On the other hand, people with problems OR people in absolute love of their vehicles tend to be more vocal about their vehicles (and other things.) The more honest but admittedly far more difficult and expensive thing would be to track down a sampling of each type of vehicle through registrations and use those to track actual repair reports from dealerships. Those specific cars could be tracked for their first three years pretty reliably for number of visits to the shop and for what purpose with almost no human bias polluting the data.

The sale of these trophies are probably what sustains the business.