Unbelievable Number Of Car Faults
Friday, 22. June 2018
What Car has carried out a survey into car faults, a subject on which I have incredibly strong views. They start their report by reminding us of the attitude expressed by our parents (or could have been just my dad) that the more you add to cars the more likely something will go wrong.
Logically that has to be true, the question is – what is an acceptable level of faults and more important is when things go wrong how well do those responsible fix the problem? And that’s my issue, far too often drivers experience faults that dealers and manufacturers fight tooth and nail not to fix whilst totally ignoring driver rights and flouting their legal obligations. And with so few people knowing their legal rights dealers get away with murder.
However, I cover this in detail in my PCP report so I’ll get back to the findings of What Car. They found that 12% of faulty cars were off the road for more than a week with the most common problem being engine related which affected 28% of the faulty cars. When checking the classes of cars they found that 35% of luxury SUV’s and 31% of luxury cars suffered from faults.
At the other end of the scale 21% of city cars and 18% of electric cars suffered with faults. Interestingly cars fitted with diesel engines suffered from more faults than their petrol equivalents. 39% of diesel luxury SUV’s suffered faults whilst only 23% of their petrol equivalents had faults. 33% of diesel family saloons had faults whilst just 24% of their petrol equivalents had faults.
Worst for faults was diesel MPV’s followed closely by luxury diesel SUV’s. Petrol engine MPV’s weren’t much better than the diesels. Whilst petrol luxury SUV’s have problems with fuel consumption they fare better than diesel cars so the advice is to take a petrol rather than a diesel.
The top 5 brands for faults, i.e. the least reported faults were Lexus (10.7%), Suzuki (16.2%), Dacia (18.6%), Toyota (18.9%) and Honda (20.6%). At the other end, the worst cars were Land Rover (44.1%), Jeep (41.2%), Citroen (39.9%), Smart (39.5%) and Nissan (38.4%).
Not in my opinion a happy state of affairs – far too many faults for my liking. By Graham Hill
