12th Feb 2011, 11:11
What people fail to do when quoting rankings sources, is look at the entire ratings system. J.D. Powers has many categories, and you can find good and bad info about every car maker. If you look at the whole picture, which would be the accurate thing to do, imports still dominate. I finally just researched it on my own after all of the J.D. Powers quotes on here, and that is what I found to actually be truth. Lexus is the single best scoring brand overall, and since they are owned by Toyota and share many of the same driveline components I can only assume that Toyota's low rankings are from perceived low quality and not actual low quality. High recall numbers will affect your company as far as how the public perceives you.
What people fail to understand for some reason is that Toyota recalled so many cars because they had to find the defective parts they had put on them. There were certain defective parts from a certain company that got used on a number of cars. They didn't know exactly which cars this one line of bad parts went on, so they had no choice but to recall them all. I have never met anyone yet that took their car in on the recall and actually had anything replaced. Everyone I know said they took them in, and the dealer told them they were okay and didn't need any work done. So that means those cars didn't need to be recalled! They were just in case... The actual number of defective parts was a small fraction of the number of recalled cars. Once again, an overblown story! This is why Toyota ranks so low. Now they have released information stating there is no electrical defects on Toyotas, so they should get back to normal soon enough.
This will go the way of every other recall disaster in history. People forget about it and move on until another car company has issues.
12th Feb 2011, 11:02
Toyota isn't second to last. It actually ranks 21st out of 33 car makers. The Land Rover has the dubious honor of having the world's worst ranking. Ford and GM are rising in both build quality and resale. The current domestics will take a while to overcome the deeply entrenched bias of publications such as Consumer Reports (who publicly admitted that they made a mistake in giving a "recommended" rating to the some Toyota models without actually giving it a proper testing). J. D. Powers uses actual problems encountered by owners of the vehicles to determine its ratings. Ford came in with fewer problems than Honda, and far fewer than Toyota.