The pity about BL is that the sharing of body design engines etc with Honda put the quality back in the product, and why you will see so many Rovers of a certain age still in daily use, arguably as long lived as Pug 405's and longer lived than many of the German marques.

Greed ruined Rover in the end not quality or lack of it, Honda dropped for BMW money who cherry picked the marques and factories they wanted, and the few who took Rover on afterwards bled it dry.

MINI brand is hardly the byword in reliability either but image and brand sells, so much for supposed BL ineptitude.

Edited by gordonbennet on 18/09/2017 at 09:23

"People rarely buy things based on logical thinking and research. Most people buy things because they are the 'in' brand or because they look good"

Long may it continue. I end up buying their unused/semi new castoffs for half price or less on ebay/Gumtree etc..

Why buy at fiull price? Done carefully I have never had any problems. My Iphone/laptop/PC /monitors. /satnav/camera were all bought like that and are still fully functional .. as are all our cars..

Even the gullibly stupid stopped buying Renaults in their period of "let's elecrtrify everything and make sure it lasts no more than 24 months" phase in the 2000s

Reliability doesn't sell. When buying a new shiny car no one wants to think about it going wrong.

Everyone says "Can you recommend me a reliable car, must be reliable etc.." then someone recommends a beige Nissan Almera or the modern equivalent and suddently it turns out in actual fact the size of the alloy wheels are 10x more important to the buyer than whether it will go wrong or not.

The fact that VAG sell so many cars and make so much money is testimony to this.

Perhaps, but I think times are changing, especially after Dieselgate (not over of course), as VAG (and possibly other brands) will have to pay out many $Bns in fines and compensation, so there's only three ways this can be paid for:

• Directly from money in the bank and not recouping the money from other sources (presumably lowering share prices in VAG);
• Putting up prices to cover the amount. This would reduce sales probably to the extent that the overall effect was either negligable or slightly negative, or;
• Reducing costs in terms of production (VAG has already done this, sometimes leading to problems, e.g. the timing chain issue) and/or R&D (which could severely impact sales through them falling behing other makes, OR reducing engineering quality (in my opinion they've got form in this area) which in my view just exacerbates the existing problems with customer perception of the brand.

Personally they should go for the first, but I wouldn't mind betting they go for the latter. Eventually, if reliability suffers considerably and its widely reported, sales and therefore profits WILL suffer. Many British makes went to the wall because of poor reliability and customer service that came out of poor management decisions to save money in the wrong way.

I would say that buying cars because of 'image' is something that seems to mainly affect the richer nations, particularly in the urban areas of the world. As economic wealth evens out over time, this may change to the more 'sensible approach' of more poorer and rural nations, where reliability is vital.

Reliability sells when vehicles get past the warranty period, and the further out of warranty the bigger the difference.

Sure, but how many people these days keep a car beyond the warranty period?. Most people lease their car as it is the only way they can afford to put the car they want on the drive.

We are supposedly 2-3 years away from driverless cars yet many manufacturers can't make a car where the screen does not crash or hold a reliable Bluetooth connection....

Quite..

Modern car electronics make a laptop appear primitive. Given the almost infinite number of variation sof things that can happen and the use of Carnbus wiring which carries signals to tell most things what to do, testing a complete system properly for all combinations will require millions if not billions of si,ulations.

Which explains why the Japanese are lagging on hi tech cars... proper testing take finite amounts of time.. and well designed and protected systems...

sales of VW branded cars have taken a beating while many Skoda, Seat and Audi models with the very same engines have seen sales climb, leaving Volkswagen as the whipping boy of the brand.

I don't know if it is that strange - I'm sure many people have no idea that Skoda/Seat/VW and Audi are all the same company and a lot of the car underneath the bodywork are essentially the same.

People do not really study stats before buying cars. Their brand perception is based on ads they see on media and what their friends/relative/colleague etc. say over dinner tables. For e.g. people buy Land Rovers not because they want to go offroad but they want to impress others :-)

To rephrase, human mind although claims to be rational, often takes irrational decisions. There is an interesting book on this topic "Predictably Irrational".

<< car manufacturers that are, in my opinion, more concerned with being 'the first to market' with such-and-such gizmo rather than adequately testing it with all the other components in the car in situ deserve all the problems they get. >>

That's all very well, but unfortunately the buyers get the problems first, having been taken in by the up-to-date image. I think they should expect better.

Some buyers will react by saying 'I won't buy another of those' while others may continue with blind brand loyalty.

<< Not sure why you're questioning my comments - I actually said .... >>

I'm not sure why you think I am questioning your comments, Andy. Any 'problems the makers get' follow from the problems suffered by their customers, that's all.

<< Problem is, someone has to be first to market with any new gadget otherwise it would take years to get on a car, I agree its sometimes too early, >>

Agreed. I think the game of leapfrogging gadgetry may have already gone too far between car makers. Some gizmos just aren't necessary, or even useful in some cases. Others are overcomplicated. But some buyers like the idea of new toys and will buy regardless.

The shapes of cars were optimised long ago in the wind tunnel, so all the stylists can do now is tinker with things like lamp clusters and waistlines - and of course they have to be bigger than the last. There will soon be no more tunes to be played on the touch screen. So the next toy will have to be a car that needs no driver. The roads are already choked with driven cars - do we need more just going on their own?

do we need more just going on their own

I`m not so sure it will happen, although there is talk of making robots think for themselves, the common sense side of the brain is something that cannot be programmed or learned by a computer. not for a very long time anyway, so I think this idea of auto cars will gradually die off

and now this new report has said global warming is not happening as fast as originally thought, electric cars and the gadgets that come with them may slow down a bit to concentrate on reducing emissions in petrol and diesel

Don't always believe what the papers say - often with, and especially concerning climate change so-called 'scientific fact' is often confused with or even deliberately shown as fact even though is a subjective opinion.

The DT, for example, published an article today saying that 2nd hand diesel car prices had risen over the past year 'despite' dieselgate, and yet less than two weeks ago they also published an article saying prices had dropped by 25%. One of the two must be wrong, as such a drop would mean that prices rose by 30%+ over the last few months, which is patently not true in my view.

All this 'talk' of self-driving cars and fully electric cars sooner rather than later is just that. Yesterday the DT (and other papers over the last few days) had an article saying that a thrid of all jobs will have been replaced by robots in the next 10 years. Just like AI coming along, we've heard it all before. Technology is advancing, but never at the rate these so-called experts interviewed say - in my view, many are doing so in order to get investment money in their tech start-up firms for their pet projects, most of which don't succeed.

Rarely does technology make a 'leap' as these people say. Real 'experts' keep such 'projections' to themselves so they can invest in things at a low price in order to make lots of £££ - hence why those so-called 'money experts' in newspapers who tell us what to invest in are a waste of time.

What most people think of as AI are actual autonomous, reasonably self-aware computers/robots etc that can easily interact with humans and perform multiple functions that we can (and not just mltuiple calculations). As far as I'm aware, ther isn't one like that yet, most are at the level of insects or have a very limited range of use in predicting choices or answering questions, e.g. chess-playing or quiz-playing machines (which cannot do both). We were promised so much more 10 years ago by now...

Anyhoo, the problem I have with both sides of climate 'science' is that its so complex and new, especially (as I found out over the last two weeks 'holidaying' in the West Country) as professional weather forecasters can't even get predictions right (often changing completely from hour to hour) from one day to the next. I personally agree that we (human) are having a significant effect on the planet's climate, but we don't have the scientific knowledge yet to determine the long term effects and extent.

In my view, many scientists like to put forward either very differing theories for most things or go with the flow becuase they either want to be seen as the person who was 'right' (very few people remember those who were wrong) or would rather just be an 'establishment figure' to keep their grant money going. Its one of the reasons I became an engineer - I don't like surprises, but I don't care what the answer is, as long as it helps. We as a species are still guessing - I think its right to err on the side of caution, but we shouldn't go to the opposite end of the scale, especially when so many so-called eco firms and tech are nothing of the sort, especially at what often are very immature stages in the development of technology.

I think that too many so-called developments in car technology are being rushed through for marketing reasons, often to pretend to be green or to cultivate an image rather than to be actually of use to anyone. For example:

Stop-start systems;

Touchscreen controls for A/C, ventilation and other very useful basic functions in cars;

Proprietary ICE and especially sat-nav systems that cannot be used without huge extra payments for 'updates' after 2-3 years and possibly won't be updated at all after 5-7 (like many OSes) rather than generic ones or even blank systems that can work on any smart phone (with the correct security installed);

Electronic parking brakes;

General fly-by-wire and computerised car control systems, given computer and OS manufacturers can't even get PCs, tablets and phones systems generally bug-free yet (for the same reasons - development periods too short). As we've seen, some cars can easily be hacked and taken control of, and not just by the Police. Probably the next stage in ransomware.

and now this new report has said global warming is not happening as fast as originally thought, electric cars and the gadgets that come with them may slow down a bit to concentrate on reducing emissions in petrol and diesel

I can't remember the last time we had a tough winter, unless you count 2009/10 for the snow, but it hasn't really been cold like it used to be with thick hoar frosts. The seasons seem to be all over the place. Surely no one can deny it. If it is down to us, then I don't have much faith in our ability to stop it. Sales of cars keep going up in the world, people want their budget overseas holidays on government subsidised jet fuel burning millions of tons an hour, life goes on as usual.

If it is down to us, then I don't have much faith in our ability to stop it.

I never have believed we could stop it, nature is a force unto itself and the world changes with or without us, I think we have to live with it and adapt, which means spending vast amounts of cash that no one apparently has(or wants to spend)

But everyone wants to blame someone for it whether it is our fault or not!

I think Corax meant that we (if it was down to us) would not heed the message and try to curb our habits. Unfortunately, whoever or whatever is to blame, the biggest elephant in this room is the global increase in population. We COULD try to do something about that, but the suggestion is too politically sensitive, and the results are too far off to interest politicians. I suspect increasing population pressure is one fundamental cause behind increasing migration waves. Life near the equator is getting less tolerable - hurricanes seem to be another reason to think about moving.

I know three natural forces to reduce population: wars/plagues and famines..They all tend to come together...

Quite so, Andrew-T. Can you imagine any politician putting policies in place for curbing population? It's a non starter, yet a sustainable population is the only thing that would save us assuming Yellowstone doesn't blow in the next few hundred years.

Yes, these policies have been implemented vigorously in China and India - but not without some major political, economic and social effects.

Brave man Movi, talking like that about the England they're about to concrete over, they'll be sending you to one of the re-education camps or you'll have antifa hope not soap or some other unemployables on your doorstep demonstrating about free speech...pause for irony sigh...or something else they don't quite grasp.