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Way back in the twentieth century, it wasn’t a question of whether a new car would need anything fixed in the first few months of ownership, but of how many things would need to be fixed. If you rely entirely on the most common sources of car reliability information, it won’t be evident how much more reliable cars have become in the past two decades. These sources don’t provide actual repair frequencies. Instead, they provide dot ratings relative to the average. No matter how much the average improves, there will be some cars above it and some cars below it, “good ones” and “bad ones.” But what if the “bad ones” aren’t all that bad? And how good can the “good ones” possibly be?

With this thought in mind, I started conducting TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey a decade ago. Unlike others, we’d post the reported repair frequencies to make it much clearer how often cars had needed repairs, and how much they actually differed in this regard. The usual outcome: in absolute terms, they didn’t differ nearly as much as people expected. Some still require repairs twice as often as others, but twice very few is far from many.



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If You Are Buying A New Vehicle Based On Reliability - Then You Are Probably Doing It Wrong

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