Since 1987, J.D. Power has asked people who bought or leased a new car what went wrong in the first 90 days. Its Initial Quality Study ranks brands and models by problems per 100 vehicles. The first study put the Toyota Cressida on top, with 69 problems per hundred cars. A company history says the surveys “defined quality in terms of how consumers judged it.”
In 2014 problems rose. A J.D. Power vice president explained that some owners said “the technology is hard to understand, difficult to use, or simply does not always work as designed.”
The plant awards are the exception. They are “based solely on defects and malfunctions and exclude design-related problems.”