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Cars and light trucks made by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU) often do badly in auto quality research. The new survey from Consumer Reports is no different. Fiat Chrysler brands littered the bottom of the list.
Most of the “Most and Least Reliable Cars” research covers 28 major brands. They are ranked by the mean score determined from a survey of Consumer Reports subscribers. Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM) held the top two spots on the list with its luxury brand Lexus in first place, followed by the Japanese car company’s primary brand.
Fiat Chrysler brands occupied five of the seven lowest positions. Fiat was at the bottom of the list, just below the company’s Jeep and Ram brands. Infiniti and Cadillac were the next most poorly rated brands, with Fiat Chrysler’s Dodge and Chrysler brands just above them. Fiat’s rating was unusually low compared to all other brands covered in the Consumer Report research.
Fiat Chrysler offered an odd comment about the results:
“We greatly value customer feedback and use it to continuously improve our vehicles. Because of this fact, we’re significantly accelerating our pace of improvement for our entire product lineup,” said Matt Liddane, Vice President – Quality, FCA – North America. “We compete with many other global players in an industry that’s always evolving and is certainly not standing still; so, we need to continue to push harder.
It would be correct to say extraordinarily harder to make up the gap between the company’s brands and virtually all the industry’s others.
Poor quality ratings have not kept some divisions of Fiat Chrysler from doing well. Jeep sales have risen 23% over the first nine months of the year to 632,910. Sales of the Chrysler brand rose 12% over the same period to 248,800. Sales of the Ram light truck division were up 6% to 358,488. The Ram pickup is Fiat Chrysler’s best-selling vehicle, with sales of 330,643, up 3%. Sales of the Dodge brand were down 14% for the first nine months of 2016 to 382,347. The Fiat brand posted more ruinous sales, falling 10% to 31,819.
While Fiat Chrysler has a long way to go to improve the quality of its products, it appears some large group of buyers does not care.
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