Toronto, Ontario — What do your favourite jeans, an old recipe and Lexus vehicles have in common? If you asked the experts at J.D. Power, they might say “dependability”, given the results of the newly released 2023 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study.
That’s right, Toyota’s highly esteemed luxury brand came out on top of this year’s report, securing a Problems per 100 vehicles (PP100) score of 133 PP100, beating out fellow upscale offshoot brand Genesis by 11 points.
The U.S. car parc at large saw an overall score improvement of six points, bringing the 2023 average to 186 PP100.
Representing the peak of mass market brands, and earning the third spot overall in their own right, Kia came away with a score of 152 PP100, followed closely by Buick at 159 PP100 and Chevrolet at 162 PP100.
Lexus and Toyota shared the crown for having the most dependable individual models, with the Lexus RX and Toyota C-HR both earning a PP100 of 111 and showing improvement in eight of nine problem categories from last year, according to the report.
Ram, Volvo and Nissan recorded the greatest improvements since last year’s report, posting scores of 77 PP100, 41 PP100 and 35 PP100 respectively.
Tesla made its debut in this year’s report, posting a fairly unimpressive score of 242 PP100.
Mass market brands came in under the industry average at 182 PP100, an eight point improvement from last year and 23 points better than the score of 205 PP100 earned by the luxury automakers.
The organization says this is the widest recorded class gap in vehicle dependability since the study launched 34 years ago, and reflects a trend that began in 2016.
The study purports that the disparity between vehicle classes results from the prevalence of new technology within luxury vehicles; new technology which tends to introduce new complexity and new problems.
Of these new technologies, infotainment systems were reported to cause drivers the most problems, reflected by a PP100 of 49.9—a score J.D. Power says is more than double that of the second most problematic area, which was exterior.
Repairers will be glad to know that 63 percent of vehicles required fewer component replacements than last year, components that include key fobs/key fob batteries; brake rotors; headlight components/bulbs; and other exterior lights/bulbs.
“It is typical in the automotive industry to roll out concepts and features by putting them in premium vehicles first,” said senior director of auto benchmarking at J.D. Power, Frank Hanley.
“A bellwether for mass market brands looking to adopt and implement these technology features into their portfolio is in two of the industry’s preeminent studies, the J.D. Power Initial Quality StudySM (IQS) and the Vehicle Dependability Study. Connecting insights from the two studies better informs automakers by substantiating trends and showcasing how some automakers are preventing problems from occurring early on and throughout the ownership experience.”
The rankings of the study were based on vehicles from the past three model years.
