bri said:
Sounds like my Disco.
My point really was that BMW are not trash as far as quality and reliability goes (in general) this is reserved for cars that consistantly end up near the bottom of the statistics, like Jeep, Land Rover and Kia.
I won't argue about your friend 740, I am talking in general. Honda, Toyota, Lexus, infiniti, Acura, Nissan, BMW and others are pretty much always towards the top of many reliability ratings, but of course these are just statistics and they vary from source to source...YMMV.
BMW lands on the to of that list because, after spending 60 grand on one, the last thing the owner wants to do is admit his car is a POS. Land Rover owners, on the other hand, all get together and drink stout and complain openly that their cars are POSs.
I can't remember where I saw it, but I read a magazine article once that discussed how the different prevailing personality characteristics of customer's of certain manufacturer's cars affects the results of surveys like JDPowers, which rely on owner responses to tally problems (if the customer fails to report it, it didn't happen). Toyota and Honda, for example, while still great cars, are actually rated higher because a large percentage of their buyers want to believe that the cars are the best, as they've read in magazines (magazines like Consumer Reports that essentially told them that if they skipped on the Honda they were mutant inbred fools). BMW/Mercedes/Porsche owners were singled out as ranking higher because owners felt that some level of unreliability was a given based on the level of technical sophistication their respective manufacturers advertised (steering rack falls out? thats ok, its a 'finely tuned machine'!). Believe it or not...Land Rover actually suffered, because customers recognized the poor reputation the brand holds and bought anyway, believeing that they could rely on the waranty and dealer to save the day were it necessary. In other words, we wear our pain on our collective sleave as a big trophy. The cars that ranked the most acurate were the brands which struggle to develope a consistant reputation for something/anything, like Nissan, Mazda etc. There were some additional points that were pretty cool too, like sports car owners reporting tire wear. Apparently, Porsche owners don't feel tire wear is an issue, whereas Nissan owners (who bitch like rabid chickens over their 350Zs) did.
It was a great article that addressed many of the concerns that I think many of us have when we see these polls. People forget there is a human factor to surveys that can't be measured acurately...it aint like the manufacturers are reporting the number of repairs they make and then calculating the stats. The industry might do that, but be sure that data would not make it to a magazine.
Makes sense too...how many paranoid posts have you seen asking if some strange clunking noise from their LR is normal? My wife's Honda's brake-pads pop and ping every morning as they shift in their seats on initial application and let me tell you, were those noises coming from the LR I'd be at the dealer asking for a waranty repair!
I wish I could remember where I saw it...maybe GQ or Esquire?
