Mini Mania Open House and Lawn Party by Jerry (Siddhartha) Bradbury
What can transform a peaceful sylvan lawn in Gold Country into a carnival overnight? The annual Mini Mania Open House and Lawn Party of course! Those who were there got to see first hand all the eye candy, but for those who were not, the Mini's ranged from an electric Moke to a VTEC powered Classic, to Randy Steven's tricked out CVT to Robert Holt’s Purple Haze convertible to three full on Mini race cars: my sprint car, Jacques Andres' enduro car and Eric and Colin Herricks's rally car, and many in between.
Infineon Raceway, April 11, 2008. by Jerry (Siddhartha) Bradbury
My Mini has a new setup for this race. Speed parts from my sponsor Mini Mania have been added by my sponsor Bay Bridge Motors and USTCC sponsor Nitto has provided four brand new NT 01 tires. This will be my first official race with the US Touring Car Championship and I look forward to hitting the grid with more horsepower and quicker lap times.
The new MINI was launched in 2001, to much acclaim. Although bigger than the original Mini, what it lacked in rear legroom, it made up for in unusual styling and a vast array of personalisation elements, much loved by a local estate agent.
The MINI Clubman has the same raft of options but its main benefit is the extra length, which should make rear passengers happier.
The Range rovers that all the folks love in my sisters neighborhood and al the landed gentry (haha!) drive in the UK have always been at or near the bottom of the league tables for reliability. I see them on flatbeds more than on the road.
This is true but also slightly misleading. Many of the luxury brands (here in CA at least) do a 'pick up and drop off' car maintenance service. You need an oil change on a Maserati? A flat bed truck arrives and carts your vehicle off to the service center. It's a great option for people with lots of $$ and not lots of time. But it doesn't make for good PR when you see a certain type of vehicle on a tow truck bed every week!
Hah! I'm with you Bill, some of the cars I covert are clearly not on any list of "dependable, reliable, worry-free" cars!
I see new cars next to me at a stoplight, and pretty clearly see the orange-peel paint job.
I've got several gargages that I give my business to and trust. Their input into what's relailable and what's not plays heavily into any choice I make.
I also admit being of the "drive it till it drops" clan, and rarely consider switching cars unless the one I'm driving is falling apart (and I'm expecting my bar for what falling apart is may be set a bit higher than most). Thus, I'm pretty anal about buying something that's going to last.
I'd love to drive a Jag, Merc, Bimmer or, well, a Ferrari for that matter. Just don't want/can't afford to own one.
Scott
New Zealand - The only place where a kiwi can mean a
fruit, bird or mini owner...
Which also mean those ratings are subjective... not scientific.
If you paid a premium for a Japanese car because it's supposed to be reliable, you're going to validate your actions by telling them it's reliable. If on the other hand you bought an American car because it was cheaper even though you think it might be less reliable, you're going to broadcast the unreliability.... the same exact type of failure could be reported very very differently depending on the survey owner's perception.
I'm not arguing that the data is useless, just that it may not be as quantifiable as you might think. I think it shows general trends and some relative data, but I think it's still pretty limited in scope.
Plus, that "worst car" in the category is likely "good enough" and far better than the average car of a few years ago. If it has other attributes that are worth the trade-offs to you, you're not necessarily ignorant or irresponsible in buying it. (Ever see the book, the World's Worst Cars? Reads like a catalog of the cars I've owned.... ;-) ) But I agree most people buy on appearance (I place hybrids in this category), straight line power, price, or the size and location of the cupholders (used to be size and location of the ash trays...)
There are few really bad cars sold today... unfortunately a lot of them have highly desirable luxury badges attached to them... falls into the "simple versus complicated" categories discussed before. I sold my beloved M3 (one of the best cars I've ever owned) partially on the relative complexity of it... it had been trouble free so far, but I could see it potentially getting expensive to maintain in the coming years. And BMW is the most reliable of the Europeans... and the complexity of the '98 M3 is less than that of a base model 3 series today...
I replaced it with my first Japanese vehicle in a decade... a Chevy Tracker. Now that's basic. And today the tailpipe fell off. ;-)
CU bases their ratings largely on questionnaire forms that are sent in by their members - i.e those that subscribe to their magazine. You get one every year to fill out - I've filled out several (Dad won't buy anything unless its highly rated in CR).
So the ratings you are seeing are largely derived from people who actually own and pay for (or don't pay for as the case may be) repairs, etc.
Steve
Life is driving Minis. Everything else is just waiting.
Most of these car companies are in business because, to put it in non PC terms, on the greater whole the general American buying public are ill-informed un-educated impulse buying idiots. There is a great lot of trash produced every single year by car companies and guess what? People still buy it. There may be 20 different cars in the segment that are better then a certain model, but they still buy the worst one. They still buy the uglist, cheapest, slowest, and most overpriced mess they (being the consumers) can find. Most people do NO research before they buy a car. They might "test drive" a few different models, but they fail to pick up on the long term reliabilty, build quality and depreciation of the vehicles. They buy now, then complain about their shotty ride later when its sitting at the dealer every other day getting fixed at $100 an hour. Only then do they figure out that they were an idiot and should have done research before they purchased that rolling-disaster-on-wheels.
I have read that all this new technology and more complex computer systems in cars are just making them more problem prone and more expensive to fix
I have a theory on this... Lets compare a few different generations of vehicles, ones that I am familiar with: Early 60's, 80's and Today.
In the early 60's, things were pretty simple for the most part(there are always exceptions). Carburetors, kettering points, AM radio, 3-speed autos or 4 speed manuals, basic body electrics. If something broke, yeah you could fix it w/ the tools in your garage, but you weren't really expecting to have the car go 100k miles and tuning the carb was probably a yearly thing. My VW Beetle, Mini, a friends Chevy Nova and Chevy Impala all fit this mold. I never expected any of them to go forever, but when they broke they were easy enough to fix. The motors were all 1 intake, 1 exhaust valve per cylinder, relatively low output. Low expectations and simplicity make things seem good.
Fast forward to the 80's. I'm going to say there were two different groups of vehicles. The simple ones and the advanced ones. The simple ones, like my Toyota Corolla and Volvo 240, would go 100k(or even 200k) miles w/o any trouble. Body electrics were pretty basic, and fuel injection and computerized ignition made "tune-ups" no more than an oil and plug change. Nothing ever went wrong, and you didn't expect it to. Stuff that might break was simple enough(hand crank windows, A/C systems), but the drivetrain NEVER broke(220k on the volvo and 150k so far on the corolla with 0 issues) so it didn't matter if I could fix it or not. You didn't get alot of power out of the motors for their size, but that wasn't the goal. We were still getting over the OPEC crisis. More "advanced" vehicles like the multitude of BMW's and Ford Tauruses my friends have owned have been nothing but trouble. What went wrong? They pushed the envelope on power/size in some cases. The primitive on-board 80's era computers, that weren't really ready for what people wanted from them, electro-mechanical bits like the power sunroofs, sub-par wiring(even for the day), and "advanced computerized transmissions". Basically people expected alot from the technology that couldn't be delivered.
Today, there are very few "simple" vehicles. Lets take the least expensive vehicle available in the US, the Chevy Aveo(I believe, but it's close enough). It rides quieter and better and probably handles on par w/ anything from the 60's, even compared to the high end sports cars. 106hp out of a 1.6L? It's not exciting, but the 1962 Chevy 230cu-in(3.7L) only did 140hp. That's a 130% increase in size for a 32% increase in power and probably at the cost of a 50% reduction in fuel economy, and you'd be glad to get 60k miles out of the motor w/o a rebuild. If your Aveo gave out at 60k, you'd be at the dealer getting it fixed for free. Even today's Toyota Corolla gets better fuel economy, has more gizmos, makes more power(on average, there were some fast corollas once upon a time), is more reliable, and just all around a better vehicle than it ever has been in the past. And it's certainly NOT they avoided computers on it. It's basically a large system of networked computers. But it's not really "advanced technology". It's appropriate use of technology. If you don't use things appropriately, it will never fulfill your expectations.
As a personal note, I'd even say that computerized engine controls are simpler than kettering points and carbs. Carbs, as far as I am concerned, are voodoo and kettering points are the devil. I don't even want to think about hydraulic logic automatic transmissions. My ears will probably bleed.
Exactly right. Mercedes used to be in that camp of providing both... look how far and how hard they fell VERY quickly and have yet to recover. Modern cars are so complex nobody will be restoring them in the future... just maintaining them....
pmustang nailed it: electronics are a super-big challenge for all manufacturers, and the more high-end cars get it worse because they've got so much going on. It can be a nightmare, even Lexus had a real hard time with their original RX.
Paint vs. the environment (both for the neighborhood, and for the workers themselves) is a constant challenge to stay ahead of for paint makers, and for the people spraying it, to maintain performance.
It all boils down to the same thing as in racing: the teams who can keep up with the changing rules will be competitive, and so while the teams at the 'top' tend to be different each year, there are always a few who tend to always be near the top who are so well run, and so well organized (and so lucky, sometimes) as to be able to deal with that challenge the best.
That said, there is more to cars than just quality. As MMcMini points out, there are usually customers who are going to go after emotional cars and be willing to live with the practical trade offs (like mini owners!). This is why JDPower added the "APEAL" survey to their Quality survey: how to measure the appeal that a Land Rover buyer will bring to their purchasing decision that a Corolla buyer would not care about (and vice versa). Though, it is true that most customers want an appliance they can just get in and drive, most would like, once in a while, a car than makes their spirits soar, in spite of the quality risks.
The big winners are those who can find a way to provide BOTH. Since each are super hard to do, and impossible to do all of the time, the deck is really stacked against anyone really consistently pulling it off.
I cannot begin to tell you the problems that my father had with 2 brand new merc station wagons he had a few years ago, things went wrong with them that would never go wrong with a normal car in its whole lifetime, He dumped them both at autction with sub 5k miles on each, I have been told that merc went to a totally new wiring harness a few years ago in all of its cars and that is when the real problems started. He has an older merc that has given basically no problems at all. I have heard similar from others.
The Range rovers that all the folks love in my sisters neighborhood and al the landed gentry (haha!) drive in the UK have always been at or near the bottom of the league tables for reliability. I see them on flatbeds more than on the road. My bubeis father in law has one with every bell and whistle that can be bought, he ends up borrowing his son in laws MINI just about every two weeks when his new RRover is in the shop being fixed.
I have read that all this new technology and more complex computer systems in cars are just making them more problem prone and more expensive to fix. I would suspect the paint problems are because of the new rules that manufacturers have to use water based paints. I know that house paints have certainly become near useless over the past few years and this months Consumer reports tells you they change the formulations year on year to keep up wtih new rules. has to be the same for car paint.
peter
No more cars left, Westpaminis is now just a memory, Good luck to all those hard working dealers left out there, We can tell you its not easy. We have fully enjoyed meeting all the fine folks we have in the business.
My partner Jane bought a new E320 a few months before I met her and if I'd been on the scene there would not have been any Merc. They are living on past reputation. The Lexus has it beat all ends up. Plus...wait until you have a Warranty problem,as I did,5 months after buying a New merc Sprinter. It went on Fire. Mercs own engineer said the fire started on the Steering column but they would not honour the warranty. Jane's car has had the Crank pulley disintegrate,literally,AC throw in the towel,and the window mechanisms seize up,and it is a low mileage car. The paint is absolute rubbish for a supposedly quality car. Regarding Jaguar,it is built on a Mondeo floorplan and they had a terrible reputation for being unable to sustain a HIT.The floor kinked if you looked sideways at them. Sad to say,but the Japs are way better built.
"Come to the Edge"he said,"I'm afraid"I said,"come to the Edge"he said, I did...and he pushed me off,...and I FLEW.
Likely start an unexpected battle on this - I'm only doing a "things that make you go huh" thing.
So, I've got the 2008 Consumer Reports buying guide (thinking of buying a minivan of all things, now that we have two little ones), and I decide to thumb through some of my favorite or exclusive marques as far as the reliability ratings.
1) How do these car manufacturers stay in business, and
2) Is it REALLY only status that makes people buy them? (because, if the reports are to be believed, they're not well put together cars).
Examples:
Merc SL 2005 - only things above average are Engine, major; Engine, cooling; and Exhaust. On 12 of the remaining 14 catagories, including things like Audio System, Paint, Brakes and Suspension, it ranked "much worse than average".
Jaguar X type - Same story, with of the 10 of the 16 catagories being below or much below average
Fair enough, engines are complicated, and high performance engines may require "special care" (although in my Toyota Corolla world, I'd still expect them to run well without breaking down), but things like paint? Audio system? Brakes?
I'd hope for a little good engineering and quality control along with my status, please?
Scott
New Zealand - The only place where a kiwi can mean a
fruit, bird or mini owner...
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Posted: May-06-2008 05:54PM
