Fiat Chrysler Quality Ratings Hammered by Consumer Reports

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 12:48PM EST · Published Feb 24, 6:43AM EST

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In January, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU) posted another month of impressive sales improvement, mostly because of demand for its Jeep sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and Ram pickups. Quality ratings of its brands have not come close to matching sales. In a Consumer Reports annual study “to determine which car brands consistently deliver vehicles that serve consumers well,” Fiat Chrysler brands were slaughtered.

The Consumer Reports data covered 30 brands. The lowest rated among them was the troubled Fiat brand, which has made no progress in the U.S. market. The leader among all brands in the study, Audi, posted an overall score of 80. Fiat’s score was 36, which put it at the bottom of the list. Among the Fiat models tested, none was recommended for purchase. Jeep, in the next to last place with an overall rating 43, also had no recommended models. Neither did Chrysler, which finished in 26th place. Only Dodge made the recommended list with 17% of its models. It ranked 25th overall, with an overall rating of 58.

Fiat Chrysler brands also have posted terrible ratings in other studies, particularly the J.D. Power 2015 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study.
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Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne has a large problem in the United States, which is whether consumers will start to turn their backs on vehicles made by the company he runs. Poor quality is bound to smother sales eventually. The open issue is by how much, and when.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.