2006-11-03

Auto Quality

When choosing a car, quality is usually fairly high on everyone's list as things to consider.  I have been the primary driver of 3 cars in my life, two of which have been around long enough to judge quality.
 
I found a nifty little tool on Edmunds: http://www.edmunds.com/maintenance/maintenance.do
 
It allows you to see any Technical Service Bulletins (TSBs) that are issued for a car.  These are basically "known issues" that the dealer probably won't fix for free, but have been reported by enough people that the powers that be think that dealers should be given a heads up in case customers come in complaining about this problem.
 
I have looked at various cars, some known for quality and some not, that have been made since 1998.  The average number of TSBs seems to be around 20-30.  Some of these are repeats with updated information.
 
My 1999 Saturn SL1 was not a high quality car, but it had only 23 TSBs from 1998 - today.
 
My 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse GT was an even lower quality car, and it had 121 TSB's issued from 2000-today.  There were at least 8 major issues (leaking floor, transmission rattle, engine misfires, etc) that affected me.  This is not including other issues that came up, costing me several thousand dollars.  Keep in mind that I sold this car with only 60,000 miles on it!
 
Moral of the story.  Mitsubishi's are shitty cars, probably worse than Fords, Kia's and anything else you can come up with.  Stay away!
 
PS: A review on my new car will be coming up soon.