J. D. Power 2006 Report

[Dinner]

And you base that on... ?

[Asher]

http://www.truedelta.com/pieces/jdpower.php

1. Motivation

For all of its faults, the heart of Consumers Union is generally in the right place. Though they're a bit stuck in their ways, the primary goal of the people who publish Consumer Reports is to help consumers.

In contrast, far and away the #1 goal at J.D. Power is to make money. Now, there is nothing wrong with seeking to make money in itself. This is what businesses are supposed to do. But it becomes an issue when the pursuit of profits not only limits the extent to which consumers receive helpful information, but can actually encourage distorted consumer perceptions of the information that is provided.

I approached J.D. Power with my proposed research a couple of years ago. They weren't interested because they didn't see how they'd earn more money with it than their existing research was already earning. They didn't disagree that my research would help consumers more. But that's not a priority for them.

This should not have come as a surprise to me. I have a number of friends in the automotive market research industry, where everyone tends to know everyone else. Over the years I've heard quite a bit about J.D. Power's basic strategy. To begin with, its focus is on manufacturers because that's where the big money is. They have recently been putting more effort into a consumer-oriented site and magazine, but the people I spoke with at the office where the research is conducted thought this a foolish diversion from the primary business of the firm.

At any rate, even the consumer site provides consumers with just enough information to give the J.D. Power name a strong reputation. They then make the big bucks by selling the manufacturers more detailed information, rights to use J.D. Power's results in advertising, special interim studies to see if quality has improved, and consulting services that advise how to improve one's scores. Maybe the Educational Testing Service should be teaching students how to excel on its standardized tests instead of letting Kaplan and Princeton Review earn millions in this business.

In the end, you can always count on J.D. Power to tailor the quality and quantity of the information it releases to the public so that its profits are maximized. It does not care if consumers' perceptions are distorted. It does not care about any unfair impact on the manufacturers. All it cares about is how many millions it can pressure the manufacturers into forking over.

2. IQS and Reliability

J.D. Power collects data at two time points. The Initial Quality Study (IQS) surveys vehicle owners after 90 days of ownership. The Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS) does the same after three years of ownership. The VDS used to survey consumers after five years of ownership, but a couple years ago this was changed to three years to better suit manufacturers' needs. Once a vehicle design is more than three years old manufacturers rarely update it, so reliability information on older vehicles is of no use to them.

One issue with this approach is that people often associate the IQS numbers with reliability, when it is more a measure of assembly quality. Through inspection at the plant and/or dealership can significantly reduce this number. IQS might be a good predictor of long-term reliability, and the VDS might be a good predictor of even longer-term reliability, but to my knowledge J.D. Power has not presented evidence to support this common inference.

3. What counts as a problem? A few years ago Hummer and MINI protested because their vehicles received low IQS scores because of poor fuel economy and awful cupholders, respectively. These weren't things as the dealer could fix, as the were endemic to the vehicles' designs. But because consumsers reported them as problems, J.D. Power counted them.

Some consumers would like all sources of dissatisfaction to count. Others would only want to know the rate of repairable issues. With J.D. Power's scores there's no way to separate the two. Ultimately, it's not clear what is being measured.

Update June 2006: this year J.D. Power has broadened what its IQS study measures to include "design quality" in addition to the "production quality" measured in past IQS studies. What is "design quality"? I haven't yet found a clear definition, but as far as I can tell it refers to the ease of use and perceived quality of the car's various bits. "Production quality," on the other hand, refers to how often things break and need to be repaired. These are two very different things, and ideally would be reported in two different stats. By combining them in one stat, J.D. Power makes it unclear what any specific score represents. Worse, many people will continue to assume that IQS represents how much trouble a car is likely to be, when the latest changes only make this further from the truth.

4. Dots

Like Consumer Reports', J.D. Power on its consumer site rates models on a five-point scale. (Model-level absolute numbers with a few exceptions are reserved for the manufacturers.) Their one to five dot ratings appear simple to understand, but they conceal far more than the convey. If one vehicle has a three dot rating, and another has a five dot rating, what will this really mean in terms of the number of trips to the shop and the number of days spent there?.

5. Only averages

Also, like Consumer Reports', J.D. Power rates vehicles relative to the average. If you dig a little bit you can learn what the average is, and infer an absolute rating accordinly. The average has steadily improved over the years. But most people don't dig. As a result, many no doubt assume that a three-dot car is much less reliabile than it actually is.

While perceptions are undoubtedly distorted by J.D. Power's emphasis on relative ratings, another factor is likely involved: people are afraid of getting a lemon, an unusually troublesome car or truck. Even if the average is the same for two models, the chances of getting a lemon could be far higher for one than the other. People might fear that even as the average rate of problems for domestic vehicles comes down the odds of getting a lemon remain uncomfortably high. When only averages are reported, there's no way to tell.

6. Focus on the best

J.D. Power's press releases highlight the models that scored the highest in their segments. The advertising they license is also for models that win their awards for being the best. In a similar vein, they have for some time only publicly released numbers only for those brands (Chevrolet, Toyota, Ford) that score above the industry average.

This emphasis on the top scorers leads to an over-emphasis on reliability. In the absence of information, most people assume the worst. So they'll be more likely to a buy a top scoring model to be on the safe side.

But how much worse are the models that fall around the average? What if the tenth model from the top will require one extra trip to the shop in the first five years of ownership? For some people its advantages might outweigh the cost and inconvenience of an extra trip. But using J.D. Power's publicly-released information it is not possible to make this judgment.

[Dinner]

As I have posted before the 2006 J.D. Power's intial quality study is flawed because it strayed away from absolute mathamatical calculations and started to introduce subjective criteria. Instead of simply measuring the size of car panel gaps and the number of defective parts on a car they have begun to subjectively rank systems by how much they "like" a system. That is rubbish because it is nonreproducable and everyone is going to have different tastes about what they like and what they don't like.

That being said, for a second time, the three year and the five year studies from J.D Powers continue to only deal with mathamatically reproducable results and that is why those studies are superior. They deal only with the number of repairs needed per car and the average cost of repairs per car over a set period of time. There is no subjectivity in such a report and thus it is a purely scientific report.

Top compare Consumer Reports, dispite its protestations that it's nonprofit status make it superior, is a completely subjective report which renders it utterly unreliable and nonreproducable. Consumer Reports relies upon people to write into their publication and rate cars on an "excellent, good, average, and poor" system which they do not explain and which no two write ins have the same standards. Such a system does not represent a statistical sampling. One person's excellent is another person's good and yet another person's average ranking. There are absolutely no numbers to back up Consumer Reports ratings. They are 100% subjective and thus based upon conventional wisdom and wishful thingking which always lags reality. J.D. Power's surverys, the the exception of the new 2006 intial quality study which has unfortunately introduced subjectivity for the first time, are entirely nonsubjective and the result of imperical measurement and mathamatically reproducable results. It doesn't matter if the company is for profit because all subjectiivity has been removed. It simply measures, cruntches the numbers, and publishes the results.

You have lost debate after debate because you have refused to acknowledge this truth just as you have falsely claimed that J.D. Powers only does a 1 and 3 year study dispite being shown in multiple threads that there is also a 5 year study. Just face the fact that you do not know everything, that you are sometimes (if not often) wrong, and that you are wrong in this case.

[Asher]

Consumer Reports relies upon people to write into their publication and rate cars on an "excellent, good, average, and poor" system which they do not explain and which no two write ins have the same standards.

JD Power randomly calls people and asks them the same things. And, yes, Consumer Reports does explain what each rating means in the booklet, if you've ever done them...

JD Power calls people at random times and asks them about their vehicle. There's no time for thinking or preparation. Consumer Reports mails out voting booklets which adequately explain everything, and it doesn't cost people a dime to mail it in (postage paid), and they can do it on their own time.

Consumer Reports' sampling base is orders of magnitude larger than JD Power, accordingly.

Further, JD Power has the disadvantage of being a for-profit company that gets its money from -- wait for it -- Car Manufacturers! This is a bit like taking a MS-funded report on Linux and saying it's completely fair.

[Dinner]

The vast majority of J.D. Powers information comes from the information which the Federal government requires manufacturers to release about their vehicles. Things like recalls, average warrenty repair costs (required as part of the information given in a perspectus for stock investors), average number of repairs per vehicle, etc... J.D. Powers has lots of hard facts backing it up while Consumer Reports has nothing; nothing other then their bias and inconsistant nonrandomly selected personal opinion. They just don't measure up.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Asher

Further, JD Power has the disadvantage of being a for-profit company that gets its money from -- wait for it -- Car Manufacturers! This is a bit like taking a MS-funded report on Linux and saying it's completely fair.

J.D. Does get money from manufacturers mostly from the advertising rights which manufacturers pay to brag about getting high marks for build quality. They'd get just about the same advertising royalities no matter who wins because such a large percentage of the buying public recognize the name J.D. Powers & Associates and they really do look more closely at cars which score well on the quality survey. Consumer Reports continually beats the drum of "we're a nonprofit so we're better" because that's all they have to stand on. Consumer Reports knows that their surveys don't even pretend to be scientific or mathamatical and that fact has got them into legal trouble on more then one occasion.

Note the case where Consumer Reports falsely accused Suzuki of building unstable and unsafe cars. They deliberately set up conditions where the Suzuki truck would flip over in order to sansationalize their story. Their claims were so malicious and unfounded that the courts ordered Consumer Reports to pay millions and millions of dollars to Suzuki for their malicious and completely false claims. Consumer Reports is unobjective crap which even the courts have laughed at.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Note the case where Consumer Reports falsely accused Suzuki of building unstable and unsafe cars. They deliberately set up conditions where the Suzuki truck would flip over in order to sansationalize their story. Their claims were so malicious and unfounded that the courts ordered Consumer Reports to pay millions and millions of dollars to Suzuki for their malicious and completely false claims. Consumer Reports is unobjective crap which even the courts have laughed at.

You're so full of ****.

The Suzuki lawsuit was dismissed: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=13673

I don't know why you have a vendetta against a non-profit consumer group who calls it as it is, and stands nothing to gain from skewing it from one angle to the other. Meanwhile, JD Power invests their entire business on receiving money from car manufacturers. And, if you paid any attention at all to the industry, it's the American manufacturers that are always saying "See! We're reliable! Look at JD Power & Associates!". Most Japanese companies need not do this because people know them anecdotally to be reliable.

The vast majority of JD Power & Associates income comes from American car manufacturers, who use positive ratings of American cars in their advertising, sustaining JD Power & Associates business. They know where their bread is buttered...

All lawsuits brought against Consumer Reports have been dismissed. You're lying through your teeth, or you have no idea what you're talking about.

[RGBVideo]

Why are you wasting your time here? It's obvious that the debate is pointless

Originally posted by Asher:
You're so full of ****.

IMHO, you're wasting your time here, Oerdin. Asher doesn't care which survey is better or which report more objective, he's only posting because he gets kicks from trolling and seeing how much he can attack others personally without getting banned. Stop wasting your time in this event of special olympics' (even if you win...), go outdoors and find that decent girlfriend of yours which you're constantly dreaming about in your myspace account.

[Asher]

I'm a troll for calling him on blatant BS?

He's the troll here. He makes **** up all the time.

[Dinner]

It looks like Suzuki and Izusu sued, won in the lower courts, Consumer Reports kept appealing, and then Suzuki and Consumer Reports settled on an out of court settlement. Consumer Reports agreed to pay Suzuki in order to settle the case.

I'm not sure if Isuzu's lawsuit against Consumer Reports has been settled or not. Basically, Consumer Reports paid Suzuki a truck load of money because they lied and deliberately misrepresented the truth. That's not a just my take, that is the facts.

[Dinner]

Deciding to give up your appeals and pay Suzuki an out of court settlement does not equal a case being "dimissed" no matter how much you wish it did.

[Asher]

Again, you're full of ****. Read the link.

Statements issued yesterday by Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, and Suzuki said the lawsuit had been dismissed "and Suzuki has not demanded or received monetary compensation."

[Asher]

I'm not sure if Isuzu's lawsuit against Consumer Reports has been settled or not. Basically, Consumer Reports paid Suzuki a truck load of money because they lied and deliberately misrepresented the truth. That's not a just my take, that is the facts.

And these are very clearly not the facts.

Seriously, do you work for JD Power? I am absolutely amazed that you're so willing to defend a company that gives high approval ratings to what essentially are its customers, then slam and make up blatant sh*t about a non-profit consumer advocacy group...

[Asher]

Is this the thread I got owned in, Oerdin?

[Ming]

Would you two just chill... Discuss the topic all you want... argue all you want... but enough of the personal crap. How about a real discussion instead of "you are full of ****"