Cars – Domestic Versus Imported Reliability
Conventional wisdom holds that Japanese cars are more reliable than their North American, Third World, and even European cousins. Given the general principles of determining reliability described above, one cannot accept this conclusion as being true all the time. The central factor in the domestic versus imported reliability debate is consistency.
Japanese cars are engineered with much greater consistency than their North American and European counterparts. Japanese engineers work very closely to design components to wear evenly across all of an automobile’s systems i.e., everything is designed to wear out at more-or-less the same rate. In other words, a Japanese car is designed so that it will fall apart completely, rather than in little bits here and there.
In the first six or seven years of a Japanese car’s life, then, there is not much that is likely to go wrong. After that, though, when trouble does begin, it will happen with a vengeance and on a grand scale. Of course, one has to exclude ordinary wear-and-tear items, such as brakes, exhaust systems, tires and other such automotive perishables from the analysis. One also has to assume that the manufacturer’s recommended maintenance schedule will be followed to the letter. Any poorly maintained car will fall apart-regardless of where it comes from.
Although this is changing now, North American and European cars are not quite as consistent in their engineering. Some components are over-designed, meaning that they will easily last longer than the car as a whole. On the other hand, there are other components that may not last as long as they should.
In the ‘bad old days’ of North American automobile quality problems, the number of substandard components was much higher than it should be, leading to the poor reliability and durability histories that we have all heard about. A concerted effort has been under way in the last ten years to change this and, to a great degree, it has been successful-with one major exception.
The introduction of new electronic and mechanical technologies into today’s automobiles throws a monkey wrench into the reliability equation.
There was a time when automotive complexity meant that a car was equipped with power windows, or perhaps it had little doors that opened and closed on the headlights. Automatic climate control was a big deal.
Nowadays, features such as electronically-controlled fuel and ignition systems, automatic transmissions, ‘active suspensions’, four-wheel steering and anti-skid braking systems make the gadgetry on a 1980 Lincoln look like a Ford Model T. The very newness and complexity of all these new features make them a potential blight for automotive reliability in five years-that is, if the engineers did not foresee possible problems. And we all know how good human beings are at predicting all possible outcomes and abuses when planning anything!
Fortunately, Japanese and many European manufacturers are loath to try new technologies in the North American marketplace without first having given them a trial run in the home market. This means that we get cars from which the ‘bugs’ have already been worked out.
Since North American manufacturers do not have anyone else to use as guinea pigs for their technological innovations, we can surely expect to see more reliability problems on cars that sport newly-installed electronics and other complex gadgets.
Let’s go back to the conventional wisdom then and grudgingly concede that most Japanese cars are likely to be a better risk than their North American competitors-but only in cases where there is some technology involved which may not yet have had a chance to try the test of hard use on our roads.
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