this article has me worried as I am seriously considering gettingan Audi A3

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...ndableCar.aspx

scroll down, near the middle of the page is a table that ranks the manufacturers in order of reliability. Out of all the characteristics a car can have, performance, looks, interior quality, mpg, and reliability,I rank reliability near the top. Audi seems to be more problematic than I thought.

 

Audi's are simply more complicated than most cars. Many people have no idea how to take care of them and then lots of things can go wrong because of it. Along the same lines, they have more parts that can break. With the proper preventive maintenance, audis can be reliable cars. It also helps to be able to DIY though, because things will break eventually, and labor can be expensive. Get the A3, you'll love it!

 

I seriously doubt that Audis are more complicated than other cars, in spite of what their advertising machine might like to claim. And even if their poorer reliability is explained fully by added complexity, that's still a negative about Audi. Likewise, having to do more things to maintain an Audi and having to treat it with kid gloves would also be a negative, if that fully explained the lesser reliability score.

Poor(er) reliability was one of the main reason I hesitated about Audi too. In the end, I thought the advantages outweighed the reliability issue, but it's certainly still there and shouldn't be swept under the rug.

One interesting tidbit to note, however, is that JD Power admits that younger drivers tend to notice and register more faults with their cars than older drivers. It's not mentioned in the original poster's link, but in other articles about the JD Power ratings they do qualify and conjecture that perhaps at least part of the reason Lexus and Buick have such a high rating is because their drivers tend to skew older. (And the opposite with Suzuki and Land Rover, I assume, which are at the bottom.)

All this to say that it's tough to glean reliable data on reliability just from surveys; there can be systematic bias in any survey methodology.

 

I don't understand why German cars in general have such a reputation of being a b!tch to fix. Yes, they are expensive labor-wise, but if you're not afraid of getting your hands a little dirty they aren't that expensive to maintain. I cut my teeth, so to speak, working on Chevys, and while Audis may be a bit more complex, a car is a car when it all boils down. They all operate off of the same principles. I've worked on Audis and VWs and rarely had a situation where I couldn't get the necessary parts at a normal auto parts store. You may pay a bit more for the parts than those of a GM or Ford, but chances are you paid a bit of a premium to drive an Audi over a GM or Ford.

Don't take your car to the stealership for service, and spend some time reading the write-ups.You'll find that it really isn't that costly to maintain an Audi.

 

I am not handy with cars in the least bit. I can at most change windshield wipers, headlamps, air filters, spark plugs, and fill up the gas and a few other fluids. Computers I can fix, cars I can't.

 

I have to agree here. The article said that the results were gleaned from 53,000 responses. How can you make a statement that one brand is more reliable based on the responses of maybe 10% of the consumers? Stupid. J.D. Power awards are worthless.

 

To be honest, that's not what I was talking about. I think it is possible to get a statistically valid sample of about 10% of the total population. The problem I mentioned is different. It's that surveys are often a bad way to get data, in contrast to, say, hands-on car inspections, even if you survey all 100% of the population. That's because there's always the potential for a disconnect between what problems someone says s/he has and what problems s/he really does have. Furthermore, this disconnect can be systematic, meaning that it (incorrectly) skews the results in one particular direction, rather than at random.

For example, suppose young people tend to complain more than old people, and suppose young people tend to buy more Audis than old people, whereas old people tend to buy more Buicks than young people. Then even if Buicks and Audis have the same "real" rate of problems, you'll get more complaints about Audis on surveys, because more young people are filling those out than are filling out Buick surveys. And thus, it will look like Audis have more problems than Buicks, but only because of a methodologically flawed survey.

 

ALL cars break...

manufacturers rely on this cause its where they make their money... cause its not in sales...

Audi pushes the performance limits w/ every model... and everyone who deals in performance and modification know that they push the wear limit increasily. its hard to design a car that performs at such a high levels and can still get 100k to 200k miles out of it.

 

Toyota got 10 winners.... wow.

 

wow talk about bringing a post back from the dead this has lied dormant for months and I'm still contemplating the Audi A3