Originally posted by Pete D:
Different POV on brand reliability.





Hmm, that's funny Toyota brands take spot 1,2, and 3. Honda brands take spots 4 and 5. Ford is the top Ford brand and it is a 15. Mercury and Mazda are next, followed by volvo, Lincoln, Jaguar, and Land Rover which is in last place. It seems that consumers reports fair and objective method of determining reliability, which disregards a person's opinion about what reliability is and substitutes the actual number of problems a car of a certain make had, actually says what I've postulated for several years. JD Power's survey is flawed at it's very core, as it doesn't look at emperical evidence about how many problems per 100 vehicles, but it asks opinions of owners. You get people like my next door neighbor some time ago who had a Taurus that was in for warranty work 17 some odd times in three years that tell J.D. Power, "Yes my car has been trouble free". Due to these poor responses, and the fact that more domestic car owners recieve surveys than Japanese car owners, the data is slanted.

However, what Ford is doing has been common practice for years at Ford, it just wasn't a formal rule. We always drove Ford and nothing else as long as my Dad worked there, even though we liked other products better. I can certainly understand why they have the rule, I mean how bad does it look when UAW workers show up to a Ford truck plant driving an Toyota Sequoia, or a Honda Pilot. It basically tells the public that the people building the cars don't have the confidence in them to purchase one. That is a bad thing for the public to see, and so it is in Ford's interest to keep that from happening as much as possible. That is the reason for A plan and other employee incentives.