"Report suggests autos may have hit a reliability threshold
By James R. Healey, USA TODAY

This is as good as it gets for auto buyers and owners, according to Consumer Reports magazine. The best brands have stopped getting better and so have the others, the magazine's data for the past five years show.

"It could indicate that the most-reliable new cars have reached a practical limit as to how trouble-free they can become," according to the magazine's annual April auto issue, on newsstands next Monday."<ul><li><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2006-03-01-consumer-reports-reliability_x.htm">klik for full article</a></li></ul>

...the lack of correlation between price and quality. A $100K AUDI is NOT 5 times better in terms of quality than a $20K Toyota. Actually, the ratio of price to quality in that example is INVERSE. This isn't unique to automobiles. It seems as if most of the price differential goes into features rather than quality. Those $80K worth of features increase complexity tending to more failures. But then feature lists and comparisons are easier to sell than quality, or at least easier to quantify.

Notwithstanding CR's declaring an automotive "Quality Wall," for any given product, quality usually can be improved at an ever greater marginal cost, but the typical buyer is unwilling to pay big premiums for marginal gains. Aviation is one area where the buyer WILL pay a lot for small quality gains. But then quality is more strongly related to safety in aircraft than in autos. If a car's engine dies, the user is usually inconvenienced; in an aircraft sudden engine failure "means houses get bigger."