Alfa Romeos - finally losing the rep for unreliability and poor service?

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Daihatsu, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes top vehicle ownership satisfaction study in Germany

For the first time since the launch of the study in 2002, Daihatsu has claimed the top spot in J.D. Power and Associates' redesigned 2009 Vehicle Ownership Satisfaction Study (VOSS) in Germany with a total score of 843 on a 1,000-point scale. The Japanese brand was followed by Alfa Romeo and Mercedes-Benz that tied in second place with 835 points, BMW was third with 834 points and Audi and Toyota that tied in fifth place with 831 points.

On the other side of the scale, Ford (796 points), Opel, Kia and Peugeot that tied with 790 points, Fiat (778 points), Chevrolet (775 points) and Smart (772 points) occupied the last five places in J.D. Power's 2009 German vehicle ownership satisfaction study. The industry average is 814 points.

Model-wise, Daihatsu's Sirion captured the top rank position in the small car category while Toyota received awards for the Aygo city car and the Corolla lower medium car. In the upper medium segment, Renault's Laguna finished first while Mercedes-Benz topped the executive / luxury and sports car segments with the E-Class and CLK Class models respectively.

Also receiving segment-level awards are the Skoda Roomster in the MPV group and the Nissan Qashqai in the SUV category.

J.D. Power and Associates' finding are based on 16,200 online interviews with German vehicle owners after an average of two years of ownership. According to the firm, German owners are asked to provide detailed evaluations on their cars and dealers covering 67 attributes grouped in four measurements of satisfaction including: vehicle appeal (32%) which covers performance, design, comfort and features; vehicle quality and reliability (26%); ownership costs (22%) including fuel consumption, insurance and costs of service/repair; and dealer service satisfaction (20%).
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Interesting. Interesting also to see Mercedes clawing their way back up, given that not so many years ago they were getting absolutely panned for customer satisfaction.

If you follow the link it also has graphs showing the top cars in each class. The best "upper medium car"? Renault's Laguna. As on of the first cars of their new drive towards quality does this signify the start of a move upwards for Renault too after languishing at the bottom for so long?

Obligatory lovely Alfa pic:
alfa-romeo-159-ti.jpg
 
What I find funny about that survey is that MINI scored so high in owner satisfaction in the German survey, but came stone dead last in the American quality survey. Either MINI owners enjoy having problems with their cars or J.D. Power is full of it.

American Survey:
2009_iqs_1.jpg


German Survey:
JD-5.jpg
 
Weird how high Volkswagen is as well. I often think of VW and MINI owners in the same boat, where they know their cars have problems - a lot of them - but don't care, because they're awesome cars.
 
those charts don't measure the same thing.
 
YSSMAN
Weird how high Volkswagen is as well. I often think of VW and MINI owners in the same boat, where they know their cars have problems - a lot of them - but don't care, because they're awesome cars.
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I don't know how VW is but most of the problems with MINI's are just small annoyances and nothing real major. I took my car in for service today and it had a lot wrong with it but nothing that was harmful to workings of the car. I had a faulty boot latch, faulty levelling system for the HID's, and a faulty license plate light. Three problems, nothing fatal. Really the only major thing (knock on wood) that's gone wrong with the car is the rear sway bar and I'm pretty sure I broke that.
 
Is that directed at me? Because if it is I think you should re-read my post.
 
Reliability=/=Satisfaction. It would be more interesting if JDPowers released the breakdown of why the scores were the way they were. You might hate your old car simply because it's dull, boring, etcetera... Minis always score well on customer satisfaction surveys, even if they score low on reliability surveys due to the niggling little (not major) problems Joey mentioned.

But, when you think about it, with scores of about 800, differences of just 50 points are pretty minor.
 
It also says something about how great some of those unreliable cars are. It certainly takes a pretty sweet car to leave customers very satisfied while the car spends most of the time in the shop.
 
Philly
It also says something about how great some of those unreliable cars are. It certainly takes a pretty sweet car to leave customers very satisfied while the car spends most of the time in the shop.
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Or a crack-pot team at J.D.Power. I still don't think I really buy into many of their surveys.
 

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