High-quality used cars result from years of incremental improvements

When I was a baby reporter back in the 1990s, Toyota, Lexus and Honda dominated quality and durability studies.

Sad to say, I've known many an editor (and a few reporters) whose impression of the industry was sealed during that time in history.

But the industry did not remain sealed in time. Confronted with evidence of customer complaints — and relentless market share gains by Toyota and Honda — the industry got its act together.

Brands that were once laggards and laughingstocks have focused on addressing their shortcomings and closed the gap, even occasionally surpassing the longtime leaders, which remain highly committed to quality manufacturing.

Dodge and Ram in recent years have jumped to the top of the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study, which surveys buyers after three months of ownership, as Hyundai and Kia did before them.

Simply put, it became a matter of survival in the industry to make better vehicles — and stop making bad ones.

"Reliability is constantly either the top or close to the top of reasons why people buy one vehicle over another or one brand over another, so anyone who has a reputation for poor reliability is going to struggle," Dave Sargent, the J.D. Power vice president who for years ran the company's quality studies, told me last week. "All of the OEMs know that, and so there's been this huge amount of effort put in by all of them, frankly, to not get left behind. And that competition, it just raises the bar for everybody."

If you give engineers a problem, they will solve it — or at least make progress. On average, quality improves about 4 percent a year, Sargent said.

With the addition of new technology — for safety, for entertainment — there came to be more to ask owners about, more things that could be unsatisfactory, more things to improve. That's how we get to all these old, very-high-mileage cars ending up on franchised dealerships' lots that we're writing about in this week's issue. Quality and durability have gotten so good that a well-maintained vehicle can remain an attractive and valuable asset even after hundreds of thousands of miles of use.

At this point, "25 years, 250,000 miles — cars can easily last that long," Sargent said.

Of course they do need replacement parts along the way.

Sargent recalled the old British sitcom "Only Fools and Horses," in which a street sweeper named Trigger wins an award for having maintained the same broom for 20 years — a period during which it got 17 new heads and 14 new handles.

Which begged the question: "How the hell can it be the same bloody broom then?" Maybe it had a BIN — broom identification number.

If Trigger replaced a wooden handle with an aluminum or graphite one at some point, his broom actually would've improved with age.

In a less-physical way, this may become the norm for vehicles as they become more controlled by software, which can be improved and updated wirelessly to add features and capabilities.

So it's only a matter of time before customer satisfaction with over-the-air updates becomes part of J.D. Power's Initial Quality Study and Vehicle Dependability Study. Thank goodness.