Quality of new vehicles in US declining on more tech use

Toyota, Honda, Nissan these Japanese brands have always easily been sure thing 200,000-300,000+ mile vehicles for decades with nothing but oil changes. My dad's got a 97 F150 with 300,000+ miles he's had since new. It did get a couple of injectors a few months ago. It's had a little more done to it than just oil changes but been a good little pickup.

 

From 1999 to 2012, I owned a small fleet of cargo vans, straight trucks, and a few pickups for my courier company. I was a dyed-in-the-wool GM fanatic until I realized that weekly repairs were not normal for new and nearly-new vehicles. I switched to Ford, and they turned out to be the most durable and reliable 1-ton vehicles for my operation. Even the 5.4l 2-valve engines were great. I had a few that spit out a spark plug, but it was an easy repair with the cheap, parts house fix-it kits. The 5.4’s never died, but usually, when the cargo vans had around 425,000 miles on them, the suspensions were worn out from the heavy loads, so I retired them.
I had a couple of Chevy Express vans that made it to 315,000 miles, but they’d had new transmissions in them before then, as well as a few new fuel pumps, gauge clusters, steering gears, and transfer cases (for the Silverados).
Now, I’m hearing that the Ford pickups of the last 3 years or so, have declined in quality too, so I am glad that I don’t have to deal with a fleet of 1-tons anymore.

 

The quality of paint and body materials is much better these days too. Had a Dodge and the bottoms of the doors and the tops of the fenders on the box begin to rot out after a couple years. Had a newer Silverado through twice as many winters as the Dodge and it had nothing more than just some surface rust on the rockers and bottom edge of the box.

 

JD Power is a survey of the first 90 days of NEW vehicles ownership

it’s meaningless in the real world

most JD power complaints are from people having issues with Bluetooth and stuff like that .plus these are the vehicles that were built and parked outside in stadium parking lots until the computer Chips could be obtained and installed , and then sold to people who paid over MSRP .

but I won’t own a new vehicle .
We have a 06 expedition and the wife has a 09 car
No way would I get anything newer .

 

The new ones with the V-8-6-4 cylinder deactivation thing are total garbage .
If you buy one of those , get the software and the hardware to eliminate it , if you still can get those parts before the fedgov bans the same of them .

 

Wont be buying anymore American vehicles at all and none made in the USA. Shortly will be on the hunt for a Toyota Highlander produced in Japan if one exists. I was told the vin with the letter J are produced in Japan.

Better quality specially when i look at an American cars at the dealership and see misaligned panels and crap.

 

I don’t think the vehicles are being built to the same standards as 10 years ago. My mom bought a new honda crv in 2018 and 45000 miles later it needed both cams replaced because they were flaking in the path of the follower. It’s kinda loud inside as well and has quite a few squeaks and rattles. It’s also extremely flimsy…a couple months after she got it dad slid on some ice and put a massive dent in the back door…and I mean he literally fell again the car not ran it into something. The older hondas they had seemed much better and all made it beyond 200k with nothing more than standard maintenance.
A little different but we had a 93 f350 with a 7.3 diesel on the farm that was run hard its whole life it had well over 300k when it got parked and really hadn’t had any major problems. A set of injectors and some u joints and obviously normal maintenance. Sadly it was parked because of rust and was perfectly operational.

 

92 Buick already has the best engine GM ever made. 3.8

 

I beg to differ. AND, when it does need it.. a gm crate 350 is still pretty cheap.

 

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