I don't know if you have found a very intriguing phenomenon, the previous automotive products seem to be more excellent in quality, such as the hegemony in the early years, the quality is very hard, and the reputation of Toyota "can not be broken" has been achieved. Toyota Crown, Volkswagen Santana, the old Passat, these old cars can often be seen on the road, and have traveled hundreds of thousands of kilometers without overhaul, and the style has not diminished in that year.
In contrast, now, Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, GM to Audi, Mercedes-Benz, often out of some of this door, that door, quality problems occur frequently. So there is a question, are today's automotive products really not as durable as they were before? The author will briefly talk to you today, and welcome everyone to add it when he says it comprehensively.
Survivor bias
This kind of cognition is actually called survivor bias, because the quality of good can be used until now, and the quality is so bad that it has long been broken, you only see the good quality, the bad quality is ignored by you, so you feel that the previous things are better than the current quality. That is to say, you only see a few old crowns and old Poussins that are particularly high-quality and have a mileage of hundreds of thousands of kilometers on the road, and ignore thousands of old models that have been overhauled or have been scrapped. Like the entrepreneurial stories that people like to talk about, you only see the few people who have succeeded, and you can't see thousands of entrepreneurs who have failed and hit the street.
The previous cars were basically mechanical, and there were fewer electrons
It must be admitted that the previous car is indeed better in terms of quality than the current product, but this is not because the manufacturer's quality control and manufacturing process are backward, science and technology are constantly evolving, and it can not be more and more backward, right? A key reason is that the previous cars were basically mechanical, simple in structure, less electronic accessories, and certainly not easy to break.
Taking the eighth and ninth generations of the crown as an example, Toyota first applied traction control to the eighth generation of the crown, the ninth generation of the crown is equipped with a 3.0-liter inline 6-cylinder engine, matching the 5AT gearbox, which was a great new technology at the time, but from the current point of view, from the three major pieces to various configurations are revealed "simple", indeed more durable. Looking at the current automotive products, the engine uses a large number of turbocharging, in-cylinder ultra-high pressure direct injection, continuous variable valve timing mechanism (CVVT, VVT, VTEC) and other scientific and technological configurations, THE GEARBOX has reached 9th gear, and there are dual-clutch gearboxes.... In addition, a series of electronic technology configurations such as adaptive cruise, lane keeping, parallel assist, collision warning \ active braking have been added, and the configuration is more and more advanced, and the probability of quality problems will of course increase significantly. For example, Volkswagen's dual-clutch gearbox has suffered setbacks and thermal failures, and honda earth dream engines have increased oil, all because the new technology is not particularly mature.
Today's cars sell high and have a large number of ownership
Today, China has grown into the world's largest automotive market. In 2019, car sales reached 25.769 million units, and the number of motor vehicles in the country was as high as 372 million, and most of them were produced in the last decade. In fact, the failure rate of automotive products has not increased much compared with decades ago, but the base has become larger, and of course there will be more quality problems, giving people the impression that the quality of current automotive products is poor.
Coupled with the acceleration of information transmission in the Internet era, good things do not go out, bad things spread thousands of miles, Mercedes-Benz oil spill incident may not have been known to few people 20 years ago, the scope of impact is very small, but now it is known throughout the country, further deepening the impression of domestic users on the current poor quality of automobile products.
All in all, the reason why everyone thinks that the current quality of automobile products is poor, cognitive bias, the Internet to accelerate the transmission of information is a very important factor, at the same time, the quality of today's cars is indeed worse than before, after all, the new technology is applied more, the risk of failure has been greatly improved. But no matter how the probability is improved, buying a faulty car or driving a few thousand, tens of thousands of kilometers on the quality problem is still a small probability event, everyone thinks