marc777

Taken from an artcile in the Financial Times today

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/322bf6f8-8e...00e2511c8.html

Survey a blow to Mercedes-Benz image
By Bernard Simon in Toronto and James Mackintosh in London
Published: March 7 2005 02:00 | Last updated: March 7 2005 02:00

The image of Mercedes-Benz, DaimlerChrysler's luxury car marque, has taken another blow with its second-most popular model being ranked as the least reliable car on American roads.


The annual reliability ranking by Consumer Reports magazine put the E-Class, which makes up more than a quarter of Mercedes sales, last among passenger cars. The ranking, based on a survey of 810,000 subscribers, is among the most widely followed guides for North American vehicle buyers.


Having had my car break down twice in the last 3 weeks I could begin to believe it - what the article doesn't refer to is the fact that that the E class is a terrific looking car and that makes up for a load.

Marc
An W211 owner for 2 1/2 years and absolutely no regrets !

shoes

This certainly explains why the residuals on the E Class have dropped precipitously, except for the CDI.

DWP

What makes the purported Consumer Reports ranking particularly suspect is that the April '05 CR contains reliability ratings for the '03 and '04 E-Class that just don't reconcile with the bad overall ranking. In the case of the '04, the rating of every single one of the ten or so areas of problem reporting is "average number of problems", "fewer than average problems", or "much fewer than average problems" - and yet the overall reliability rating is "below average" and (in the summary of the car) "poor."

sacguy

I noticed that to, did not make any sense. Also, noticed that their review of the E series was very, very positive. Maybe the reliability they are stuck on has to do with the comand problems in late 2002/early 2003, minor but repetitive electronic glitches and possibily complaints about the brakes??? The engine,chassis, etc., seem to have no problems. I do not know how they can forecast future reliability as poor when the surveys are trending up.

SAguirre

I brought this exact point up a few months ago. It makes no sense that all the ratings on Consumer Reports shows the worst rating to be AVERAGE (a empty black circle) and every other category is either above average or excellent. So if you averaged the overall reliability on the 2004, it was well above average.

Some people on this board said that the overall rating is sometimes done by what people think about the car. This sounds totally stupid to me and makes me think that Consumer Reports should stick to rating appliances and soaps, but stay away from cars. My family once bought a Honda and it was plagued with little problems and rattles. Not to mention, the car seemed like half of what a same size 190E felt like. Yet, the Honda was supposed to be a best pick (NOT!).

Most all the problems have had with my E have been very minor. Some of the electronic problems are on features that only exists on MBs. If I had to buy another car, it would still be a Mercedes, in my opinion, they are still great cars.

Steve

MBE55AMG

... yet most reliable on the German Autobahn.

shorthair

Mmmm, I get the survey every year and I am asked to report the problems I had with the car, not an overall rating about the car itself...

Anyway, to provide more information to several other posters about the ratings of newer vehicles, it is clearly stated in CR:

"2004 Models were generally less than 6 months old at the time of the survey, with an average of 3,000 miles. Vehicles that new should have few problems, so a score of (half red circle) or worse is BELOW average for most."

DWP

OK, I've gone over the April Consumer Reports. Can somebody please tell me just where it says, to quote the Financial Times, that the E-Class "ranked as the least reliable car on American roads. .... The annual reliability ranking by Consumer Reports magazine put the E-Class, which makes up more than a quarter of Mercedes sales, last among passenger cars"?

The closest I can find to that quote is on page 17, where it says that the E-class, along with the Porsche Cayenne, the turbo Beetle, the BMW X5 and the Mercedes M-Class were "worse than average." The chart on page 18 has the entire M-B range third from the bottom in predicted "2005 New Car Reliability", besting only Jaguar and Land Rover. However, the range of predicted reliability scores they show for M-B is wide, and the Pride-o'-Dixie M-Class probably has something to do with the low ranking for the M-B brand as a whole.

shorthair

I think FT extrapolated a little from CR, but on page 81, right side under the heading "Used cars to avoid - models that showed below-average reliability in our 2004 survey" it lists: E class 99, 01-04, E class (AWD) '00.

On a side note, under the heading (Bottom right of page 81): CR BAD BETS - Be especially careful when considering these models. They have shown several years of much-worse-than-average overall reliability in ther 1997 to 2004 models." The list shows a bunch of cars, including Mercedes CLK, C Class, M Class, S Class. (missing from this particular list was the E Class.)

While not mentioning the E class, the graph on page 18 titled "2005 New Car Reliability", shows MB 3rd from the bottom, "worsted" only by Jaguar and Land Rover (with Land Rover noted as being rated on one model only).

NATS64

CR didn't ask me. Mine is doing just fine, thank you.

Dema

They only asked people who had problems.

shorthair

JFYI, more detail about th CR auto reports:
http://www.consumerreports.org/main/...ng0504rsu.html

JimPurdy

This too is an exercise in "Expectation versus Reality" in my mind. "Consumer Reports asks its subscribers to note “any problems with your car in the last year…that you considered SERIOUS (because of cost, failure, safety, or downtime).” As I noted in another post that if a $10k car just runs it is good while any problem with a $60k car is serious. The expectation is much higher as the cost increases. Also, these surveys don't really look at lifespan expectations. Do you expect the $10k car to run for 250k miles? I expect an MBZ to last that long.

Jim

nasdaqsam

I respect your opinion but I have to disagree with it.

A $10,000 car to a person that can "afford" a $10,000 car is just as important to them as a $60,000 car to someone that can afford it is, maybe even more so. I know many people that can only afford the less expensive car and they complain or expect every bit of what I do out of my cars.

When CR sends out the questionaires the questions are the same regardless of who built it.

steph280

I didn't ask much from my last MB, only 10 years and 150K miles. But at 8 years and 100K miles the repair cost has already exceeded 50% of the blue book price. So I had to trade it in for something more reliable.

I seriously doubt the current MBZ models can last 250K miles. But I know several $10K Camery from the early 90's still running strong.

krispykrme

how? do they hack into MB's system and only send out questionnaire to owners that have problems?

That is a big claim that you can't prove.

The questionnaire are randomly send out. Hence by normal distribution, it should be random.

JimPurdy

My understanding is that the survey is sent randomly to the Consumer Reports subscribers. That is not a true random sample in my mind.

Jim

krispykrme

If that is the case, you will need to prove that the CR subscriber has bias, hence it's not random.

I don't think the subscriber base should have any effect because that should be indep of how the car would perform. As long as the survey base is not solely based on owners that has problems, then the survey should be random.

DWP

Randomly? I thought they went to each and every CR subscriber. I get one every year; I can't recall a year when I didn't get one. Whether they are sent out on a randomly-chosen basis or to every CR subscriber, the results still aren't a "scientific" sample of drivers. CR subscribers probably aren't representative of the driving population as a whole. I can't quote numbers, but I suspect that we're older, higher-income and more-formal-education than the driving population as a whole. I also suspect that because we fancy ourselves to be informed, perceptive people, we're more likely to notice, and complain about, flaws in the products we buy. In addition to the built-in bias from using the CR readership base, readers choose whether they will respond to the questionnaire, and self-selection always compromises survey results in ways that can be difficult to quantify.

SAguirre

Well, I found the link to the CR site here quite interesting. By no means could you call it a good sampling since it only sends information to CR subscribers. Also, if you get a survey, you are a lot more likely to report bad news than good news. That is just a basic fact.

I am not saying that MB quality is great, but I am not in agreement about it being the worst car on the road. I am a really picky consumer and when I pay cash for such a car I truly expect everything to be perfect. My car has had minor problems and I really don't mind what has gone wrong. However, I really don't consider software upgrades to be a BIG problem and it should not be ranked at the same level as a alternator failure. All of the things that I have had issues with don’t even exist on the top of the line Hyundai!!!!

I hope my MB has stabilized and will not cause me to bring it in for anything other than oil changes, it sure seems like it has though.

Steve

konigstiger

Lexus (a.k.a. Toyota) calls it “poke yoke” (po-kay yo- kay) – error proofing! If the Japanese and Koreans can do it adequately inclusive of software, why can’t the Europeans?

krispykrme

No. By your assumption that most CR subscriber will report problems. But all manuf has the same obstacle, and by no means its only isolated to mercedes.

Therefore, the result of survey will still be indep. of so called biased respondant pool. The performance of the car should be indep of the survey pool.

JimPurdy

If the Japanese and Koreans can do it, why can't the US do it? We live with software bugs that have been with us for decades. How many times do you dial a phone number and get an error message of some kind. You assume that you must have hit the wrong button - WRONG - you dialed the correct number but your call hit a software bug in one of the switches. The only difference between the phone bug and the one in the car is that you can actually see the error and know that it wasn't you that caused it.

Jim

krispykrme

That's not true.

You are now claiming that the subscriber base is not random. Unless CR's subscribing base is known you can't make that claim regarding the education background has any effect on the sampling result. You need a formal break down of CR's subscriber's base.

It's more than likely that CR's subscriber's base are just as diverse as the normal population (i.e. random). Therefore CR's survey is being send to a random group of population that happens to be CR subscriber. The survey is indep. of what the car actually performs.

Lexus clients are almost identical to Mercedes. Hence all of your assumption if true applies to Lexus as well. But they perform much better than mercedes. So what does that tell you. The performance of the car itself is irrelvant of how the survey was sent out to CR subscriber's pool.

Therefore, it should be more than clear that this is a random testing. CR is not isolating out the survey to owners that have problems. Therefore, it should be consider as a random survey of all owners. Unless you can show me a proof that CR subscriber that drives an accord is some how dumber and less caring than a mercedes owner that subscribers to CR, then you might have a point.

But i think that the lexus result would obviously blow a hole in your logic.

THundar

Let's face it. We are all here because we loved the look and performance of the car; and we have a passion for automobiles.

This is an incredible car by all accounts, but it had troubles in the first year of a complete redesign. That Consumer Reports Rating is going to rise each year and will continue to rise while MB takes care of troubles (under warranty) for our older model vehicles.

I bought my 03 used with 22k on it and immediately had several things fixed by the dealer at no charge that I learned about on this forum. The poor previous owner took a bath on the car because he was either unwillingly or unaware that things could be fixed for him. He may have even filled out one of those CS surveys. Well, the car is superb and best thing I have ever driven.

Another note, my previous car, a 2001 BMW 330ci, was a great looking and performing vehicle, but I had multiple major recurring problems with it. I would have crucified it if I had ever gotten a survey about quality and reliability. I doubt you will ever see the 3 series BMW listed as below average in anything but that does not make it the rule.

IMO, this car is the best thing on the road. The 5 series BMW was just too ugly.