The survey to which you refer came out in April 2004....not exactly topical!!
Presumably the 2005 survey will be available in a couple of months from now.
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Yes, and what happened to the Smart?
(See my post April 2004)
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>>See my post April 2004)
You didn't register until August 04.
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The Octavia came near the top, the Passat(which is essentially the same car) near the bottom. So much for owner's satisfaction surveys.
Yes but for one you have to visit a Skoda dealer and for the other a VW Dealer (urgh) , and the fact that the Skoda will be cheaper for the same level of equipment, whilst the overall dealer service network is often considered better will make a difference in scores.
It just proves it does not take much to ruin an essentially decent car.
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>> The Octavia came near the top, the Passat(which is essentially the >> same car) near the bottom. >> >> So much for owner's satisfaction surveys. >> Yes but for one you have to visit a Skoda dealer and for the other a VW Dealer (urgh) , and the fact that the Skoda will be cheaper for the same level of equipment, whilst the overall dealer service network is often considered better will make a difference in scores. It just proves it does not take much to ruin an essentially decent car.
I accept your point about VW dealers - I too have suffered.
However 'Dealer Service' is given the lowest weighting in the scoring - hardly enough to make such a difference?
IMO if someone is unhappy about one aspect of a car they tend to be less than objective in their assesment of other aspects; which is my objection to owner satisfaction surveys.
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The Octavia came near the top, the Passat(which is essentially the same car) near the bottom.
The Octavia has more in common with the Golf. Skoda's equivalent of the Passat is the Superb.
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these surveys prove one thing.............
a skoda onwer by nature ,will have a lower perception of what they really want,,they buy a skoda not expecting a lot..and they get a good deal..whereas a vw passat driver,,will be expecting a lot,,,and if it dosnt quite live upto that expectation,,they will mark it lower......
i drive a bmw,,so i expect it to be purfect......
if something goes wrong,,,i am more annoyed than a skoda driver.
and would mark accordingly
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these surveys prove one thing............. a skoda onwer by nature ,will have a lower perception of what they really want,,they buy a skoda not expecting a lot..and they get a good deal..whereas a vw passat driver,,will be expecting a lot,,,and if it dosnt quite live upto that expectation,,they will mark it lower...... i drive a bmw,,so i expect it to be purfect...... if something goes wrong,,,i am more annoyed than a skoda driver. and would mark accordingly
I don't buy this argument at all. I think all buyers of new cars expect very high standards of reliability these days - its pretty insulting to Skoda buyers to suggest that they have low expectations.
If you extrapolate this argument to the survey results then you are saying that Japanese owners have low expections and therefore score the car highly when, contrary to their 'expectations' it doesn't go wrong. From my experience I would say that buyers of Japanese cars have the highest expections of all. A primary selling point of Japanese cars is that they are extremely reliable - owners are gutted if they have a fault.
BMW don't score so highly because they have more faults. I know for a fact (because I work in the car industry and have BMW contacts) that a lot of recent BMW's (i.e up to three years old) are having warranty claims for cooling and electrical system faults. This has nothing to do with expectations - these are real faults that mean the car won't run properly.
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It is becoming a bit of a yawn that Aprilla had a problem with his own BMW, which I accept was a just complaint, and
as a result of which he has a personal vendetta against the company`s products.
I know that there are the odd problems, but the fact that the 5 Series was placed 8th and 3 Series was placed 14th out of 140 different models only indicates that there are plenty of other manufactures with even more problems, and that includes Mercedes.
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if i pay £30000 for a car and it breaks..........i am very very annoyed
if i pay£9000 for a car and it breaks...........i am just annoyed..
that is the difference my friend....
i owned a mazda 323f 1998 brand new...it was very good but it was thin..it was trading on its reliability reputation..
a bmw or merc trades on its well built reputation.
i dont buy this reliability issue....
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Actual reliability and repair cost stats are hard to come by, probably impossible if you want comparability between marques. My brother worked for a BMW dealer for 12 years - at one point they lost count of the new engines they had fitted. We now know this to be the infamous Nikasil problem. All the customers got the same line - "it's very unusual".
As to buyers who spend more being harder to please, sometimes it works the other way. I know people who are ludicrously loyal to prestige marques despite repeated problems. The dealers massage their egos and they just think they've been unlucky. Meanwhile company car drivers moan about the quality of their reliable Fords and Vauxhalls and if they don't break down they think they have been lucky - rather than give the manufacturer the credit they'll bitch about something completely trivial.
One source of information is from extended warranty data. I do know from a past life that the insurer of the warranty scheme for one prestigious German marque never managed a profit on it, due to frequency and cost of claims.
If my life depended on it I'd have no trouble choosing between a Honda and a BMW.
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Speaking of warranty data, I'm sure this has been posted before but it is interesting nonetheless - in fairness to BMW, the 3 series looks about twice as good as an Alfa 156!
www.reliabilityindex.co.uk
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It is becoming a bit of a yawn that Aprilla had a problem with his own BMW, which I accept was a just complaint, and as a result of which he has a personal vendetta against the company`s products.
This is a completely unfair statement. I don't have a vendetta against the company at all. In fact I work for them (in Munich) from time to time and know many people who work for the company both in the UK and Germany. I had problems with my 7-series, but that was mainly down to the dealer rather than the car. I think that BMW products are good and I have often said so. In fact I occasionally buy one at auction (usally an older 3-series) and sell on for a profit. But they do go wrong from time to time and need fixing and are not as reliable as Japanese machinery. I *know* that they have had recent problems with cooling systems and particularly electronics. You can take it or leave it - but its a fact and most in the trade will tell you the same (other than the dealers!). In fat, IMHO, the whole German motor industry needs to get its house in order - the move to higher-tech electronics has not been entirely sucessful for them - especially when compounded with a move to outsourcing of production to Easter European facilities.
Remember, most of the parts on a BMW are made by the same companies that make parts for GM (Opel/Vaux), VAG etc. and the parts are often assembled on the same production line. So if Siemens has a problem with connector failure (for example) then the same problem is likely to manifest itself on all the units that use that type of connector - whether they be supplied to BMW, GM or whoever. Look at some of the steering parts on a BMW (supplied by Lemfoerder) and you will see that they look almost identical to parts on a Merc (also from Lemfoerder) - probably designed by the same guys.
A problem is that many BMW drivers 'buy in' to the advertising and the 'reputation' and go into denial about possible problems. Far from being more 'picky' I have found many owners to be more forgiving of faults......
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Hi Aprilla apart from being a disgruntled BMW owner, I work for a very major investment fund based in the middle east as an equities analsyst within European Equities divison. THis provides as with access to the wider investor and financial community reagrading the undertaking of financial investments in quoted car manufacturing groups. I can tell you that as financial investments the quoted group worth buying is based in Japan and its name begins with a "T". The German car companies are living in different era, the fact is that they are simply in efficient , incompetent and arrogant. I know because I/we have had visits from senior management, such as CEO's, CFO's and Heads of Investor relations. But the problem with the German car industry is not just with the German car industry, the same could be said for the retail and banking industry, nottoriously unprofitable and inefficient. It seems to me that culturally Germans are unable to accept the fact that they have a problem and it requires fixing. I recently read a report from Credit Suisse First Boston, one of the major broking houses on Wall Street which stated that VW/Audi group has over 50 different engines in production. Not withstanding the manufacturing and design complexity of maintaing such a vast range, it must be expensive and plain ineficient, for example VW and Audi both have V6 engines of similar capoacities but with different angled V's...why?
Did you know that the emirate of Abu DHabi was interested in buying a stake in VW/Audi, the shares on offer were treasury shares quoted at say 34, market price of VW fell to 20 ...VW wanted Abu Dhabi to buy at 34...Abu Dhabi said get lost....
Rgds.
Kal
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>>It is becoming a bit of a yawn that Aprilla had a problem with his own BMW, which I accept was a just complaint, and
as a result of which he has a personal vendetta against the company`s products.
?
I haven't noticed any vendetta. And I have to read every note in this place. I do know that Aprilia seems immune to the emotional side of car buying and has a purely practical approach, but I've found what he has to say as reasonable and, as far as I can tell, objective.
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I haven't noticed any vendetta. And I have to read every note in this place. I do know that Aprilia seems immune to the emotional side of car buying and has a purely practical approach, but I've found what he has to say as reasonable and, as far as I can tell, objective.
I have been working with cars for well over 40 years. My grandfather and then father ran garages and my very earliest memories are of being pushed to the garage in a pushchair and seeing my grandfather relining brake shoes with asbestos and copper rivets! As a youngster I also built a 'Rochdale' kit car (for all you oldies that remember them - think it was based on an old Ford 8??). Never seen a GRP moulding with so many bubbles in it - took me about 6 months to rub it down and fill!!
When you've spent your youth jumping in and out of different cars all day, shuffling them around of a forecourt and changing oils and filters etc, not to mention going out on night-time breakdowns in the middle of a Peak District winter then its not difficult to become a bit 'detached'. I also find brand loyalty a bit odd (why do all the kids these days wear clothes with labels on the outside and drive cars with a big 'Kenwood' banner across the top of the screen?). I must confess to some enthusiasm for Alfa Romeo in the late 1970's/ early 1980s (I had a couple fo Sprint Veloces) and I do admire the Japanese for some superb engineering and the ability to produce very sophisticated high-performance cars that are almost totally reliable.
I have worked on Mercs for many years and I like them because they seem 'familiar' and have traditionally been easy to service, although they are not necessarily the most reliable cars at the moment. I'm less of a fan of the BMW because they've had so many design faults in the past (e.g. overheating and cam wear on the small-block 6's; HGF and self-removing cam banjo bolts on the big M30 6's; instrument pack failure and blower control failure on almost all E32/34's at some point or other; Nikasil!! - I could go on, but you get the idea). I have a high regard for German engineering in general and certainly don't think that they are incompetent. I think that the incorporation of high-tech electronics into many European cars was a bit 'rushed' as was the 'gold rush' into low-cost East European manufacturing.
Prestige car owners can be a funny breed and will often refuse to accept any failing with the car. At the end of the day a car is just a piece of machinery and sooner or later will go wrong in some way. Investing a lot of emotion in a piece of machinery seems to be an odd thing to do - at the end of the day you are going to be let down! As for people who give names to their cars, well.......!!
People can also look at their cars though rose-tinted glasses. I have stood next to an owner with his car up on ramps. He'll stand they with a warm glow, "What do you think, isn't it immaculate". While you're looking at some clapped-out 3-series with expensive alloys, but with with worn rear subframe bushes, prop couplings and centre bearing wrecked by hard starts, front bushes all perished, scored and warped discs etc etc.
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Agree with Aprilia - I bought Japanese for exactly the reasons he states and have very high expectations of quality and reliability. I will be extremely upset if anything goes wrong with my car and will be hot on the phone to Mazda.
IMO Aprilia's input to the BR is always fair, logical and objective. The fact that he may view cars more on a practical basis than anything else is great for all those out there who feel the same and just want cars which do what they should as well as they should.
Blind brand loyalty probably accounts for some of the industry's problems. In over 20 years I've never owned 2 cars of the same marque - I'm hoping my Mazda experience will be different though.
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I asked this quistion some time ago but never recieved a answer?
Are mazda owned by ford and if so do you still class them as japanese!!silly really but do we still class the new mini's as english because there not really are they?
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its pretty insulting to Skoda buyers to suggest that they have low expectations.
I understand the original point: perhaps as a Skoda owner I expect little more than a full set of wheels, an engine to make it go, and paint to make it look nice*. Nonetheless, I'm happy to report that in nearly two years of ownership, my Fabia has been in a garage only once. This was for its first annual service, little more than an obscenely overpriced oil change.
*I think I'm quoting a car ad from a few years ago. Can anyone remember what it was?
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The Octavia came near the top, the Passat(which is essentially the same car) near the bottom. So much for owner's satisfaction surveys.
Having driven both, and had a Passat for four years, I would agree that the Octavia should be higher than the Passat.
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'I don't buy this argument at all. I think all buyers of new cars expect very high standards of reliability these days - its pretty insulting to Skoda buyers to suggest that they have low expectations.'
I filled in one of these questionnaires a couple of years ago and this is indeed how cars like Skodas get higher marks.
If you buy a car expecting it to be wonderful and it is - you are not giving it high praise apparently.
--
I wasna fu but just had plenty.
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