Long Term Impala Proves To Be Reliable As Japanese - But With 3 Recalls About As Defective Too

Pretty much goes along with what we have been saying for quite some time. You are more likely to have unscheduled visits to the dealer these days for safety recalls than for reliability issues.

Reliability, safety and quality are not really related.

Reliable? When I think reliable, I imagine that the car has to be on the road for 10 years. This doesn't show that it is reliable, just that in the short term it performed as well as the competition and is deserving of consideration for purchase.

I agree. It has 15K miles on it...it should be reliable. The previous Impala and the one before it were VERY durable.

Matt, were they as durable as the new Corvette Z06 which has a broken engine with less than 1000 miles?

And only at 15k, "any" car better be reliable.

But if they are to say it is simply reliable just because it ran good for 15k miles, then damn. I can now see why the American companies don't know jack about what reliability even is. My family's Honda, Mitsubishi, Infiniti, Lexus, Acura, Subaru, Mazda and Toyota "NEVER" gave us much of troubles, and not many trips to dealerships, either. And we put down around 150k ~ 250k on all of them. This is what you call the "Japanese engineering", which is pretty much the master of reliability.

@JDMUSMuscle reports of the previous Impala going 200K miles without issues was quite common AND they had rather remarkable MPG too.

You're a cultural bigot.

Nope, not cultural bigot. I simply speak the truth and I am not biased.

And I've seen a lot of people who call the Impala a piece of junk. Not sure why, but I think their opinions seem a lot more convincing than yours for some reason, Matt. No offense, though.

@JDMUSMuscle - And how many of the Toyotas and Hondas were recalled?

I'm not saying for a moment that the Japanese don't make a durable product, however I do question if they are superior to anything else on the market at this time.

We have owned a variety of different nationalities of vehicles, and the Japanese are good, but IMHO really don't stand out from the rest of the crowd. In fact one RX was in the shop 5 times in 2 years for warranty issues (1 time the car was DOA). The ML350 that it replaced was in once for the same time frame.

So it is more of a roll of the dice than anything else.

Now stretch that out to 100K miles and you might have a different story.

I just checked the VIN numbers and the ML350 has had zero recalls, the RX has been recalled 2 times.

Again durability and quality don't always go hand in hand.

So maybe the real question is how many shop visits are too many regardless of the reason?

I usually do not trust RX to be honest.

However, my experience with tons and tons of Japanese cars tells that I do not see why the Japanese cars are not the most reliable products in the market.

I mean, who dominates the used car market? It is very easy to determine if they are reliable or not by looking at this, and practically the Japanese still dominate.

My hope is to see the American car companies beating the Japanese, but honestly, this is not happening because, the American companies simply are not competitive. If the U.S. made far more reliable cars, they should have no problem selling tons in all over the world. But what do the Asian countries usually buy? Toyotas, Hondas, etc. Thailand is like filled with Japanese cars.