2005 Legacy Gt Stage 2 Protune on 2040-cars

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Car owners getting more irritated with their repair experiences, study says

The J.D. Power U.S. Customer Service Index Study (CSI) is a barometer of a vehicle owner's happiness with the service experience. While it wasn't all bad in the 2023 study, the overall owner satisfaction score dropped. This year's tally of 846 out of 1,000 is two points down from 2022, the 43-year-old study's first decline in more than 28 years, and one point down from 2021. However, the overall score remains well up from the pre-pandemic scores of 821 in 2018 and 837 in 2020. The study claims the stumbling block is the horde of BEV launches. The flood into the new energy space has created a recall rate among EVs that's more than double the rate for ICE vehicles. Furthermore, dealership service department knowledge of EVs isn't on par with internal combustion engine expertise, leaving EV owners less satisfied with service advisors compared to ICE owners. Chris Sutton, VP of automotive retail at J.D. Power, said, "As training programs for service advisors and technicians evolve, EV service quality and customer experience must address both the vehicle and the unique customer needs. The EV segment has the potential to spur massive convenience improvements in how customers service their vehicles — but weÂ’re not seeing the benefits yet." Matters are slightly worse for all owners, though, with labor and parts shortages contributing to longer wait times for service appointments. The CSI study surveys owners and lessees of one- to three-year-old vehicles to gauge their happiness with service at franchised dealer or aftermarket service facilities for maintenance or repair work. The criteria in order of importance are service quality (32%); service advisor (19%); vehicle pick-up (19%); service facility (15%); and service initiation (15%). Lexus retains the top spot for luxury brands, giving it three wins in four years. The Japanese automaker won in 2020 as well, its run interrupted by Porsche in 2021. Cadillac, Infiniti and Acura complete the luxury top 5.  For mass-market cars, Mitsubishi wins again after a victory in 2021 and falling to fourth last year. It's followed by Mazda, Buick, Subaru and Mini.  Considering the different service needs and service experience of different body styles, the study has broken results out by segment for the first time. Lexus earned a second victory thanks to winning the premium SUV segment, and Mitsubishi earned a second victory by winning the mass-market SUV/minivan category.

Here's why the most-ticketed cars story is junk

A recent study from Insurance.com found that owners of the Subaru WRX were the most likely people in the US to be ticketed for traffic infractions, with 33.6 percent of them receiving a citation in the last three years. Coming in a close second and third were drivers of the Pontiac GTO at 32.7 percent and the Scion FR-S at 32.6 percent. At first glance, this report looks like just a mildly interesting anecdote to tell your friends during a lull in conversation, but there seems to be a serious problem with the methodology here that might be blowing these numbers way out of proportion. Insurance.com explains that it based the study on 557,238 drivers who requested online insurance quotes from its service from January 1, 2013 to July 2014. To make it onto the list, a vehicle needed over 50 quotes, and in the end that left 526 models. However, these facts are almost useless because the list isn't based on percentages from the whole pool. The study's ranking comes from owners of specific vehicles, and these numbers aren't mentioned anywhere in the company's press release. All we know about the sample size for each model is that it's higher than 50. Assuming that amount for the WRX means it would only take about 17 people with tickets using the site to put the sporty car in first place. These unknown model sample sizes might explain some of the extremely odd entries on the list. For example, the long-discontinued Mercury Topaz is in seventh place with 28.8 percent of its drivers receiving tickets. The GTO and Toyota Supra are also in the top ten and out of production. Just a few people searching for these vehicles could be the reason for these strange results. Obviously automotive studies have their place, but this one just appears to have gotten confused along the way. Scroll down to read the report to see what we mean. Ticket magnets: The cars with the most violations September 30, 2014 (Foster City, CA) – One in three drivers of the Subaru WRX has a recent traffic violation, according to a study by Insurance.com, the car insurance comparison-shopping website, putting the turbocharged, all-wheel-drive sport-compact atop its ranking of cars that get the most tickets. The most-ticketed brand overall was Scion, with 27.5 percent of all owners reporting a traffic violation. Insurance.com looked at data from 526 models and more than 557,000 recent customers.

2015 Subaru Outback

Realistically, many enthusiasts give horrible, horrible car buying advice. They will recommend something bizarre, inappropriately high performance, compromised or utterly impractical for a given consumer's needs, and they'll almost never recommend something that makes sense. And then they'll come up with 3.7 million reasons why the leading vehicle someone is thinking about is a bad choice.
Or maybe that's just what I do.
Regardless, if you poke, prod, bother or just get us drunk enough, eventually you'll begin getting honest feedback. And more than likely, we'll tell you, in hushed tones, about the many virtues of very, very boring cars. We'll talk about why the Toyota Camry is actually a pretty decent purchase or we'll explain how spacious and feature laden the Nissan Versa is.