Fiat Crushed in Vehicle Dependability Survey

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 31, 12:37AM EST · Published Feb 14, 6:15AM EST

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Fiat Crushed in Vehicle Dependability Survey — © fiatusa.com

Fiat, the small car brand of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU), has struggled with sales in the United States. Among the reasons, almost certainly, is that the brand gets poor marks in consumer automotive surveys. This continued as the brand was routed in the new J.D. Power 2019 Vehicle Dependability Study. It finished dead last among the 31 brands measured

J.D. Power uses a measure of problems per hundred vehicles. Data in the survey are for 2016 model vehicles that original buyers have owned for three years. A total of 32,952 people were questioned for the study over the period of October to December 2018. The industry average for the results was 136. Fiat scored 249, by far the worst score. The top brand, Lexus, had a score of 106.

Fiat posted poor sales for the full year 2018, down 41% to 15,521. This means Fiat dealers sold an average of only 43 cars per day nationwide.

Model	2018 Sales	2017 Sales	Volume Change
500	5,370	12,685	-58%
500L	1,413	1,664	-15%
500X	5,223	7,665	-32%
Spider	3,515	4,478	-22%
FIAT BRAND	15,521	26,492	-41%

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Fiat has done poorly in several surveys recently, including others from J.D. Power and Consumer Reports. As Ford and GM exit the small car segment of the U.S. market, it is a mystery why Fiat Chrysler has not done the same.

Other Fiat Chrysler brands did poorly in the survey. Dodge ranked fourth from the bottom with a score of 178. Ram, Fiat Chrysler’s truck division, ranked fifth from the bottom with a score of 171. Jeep ranked eighth from the bottom with a score of 167. Fiat Chrysler had a good year in terms of total vehicle sales in 2018, up 9% from 2017 to 2,235,204. The increase was well above the industry reading, which was up 0.3% to 17.27 million.

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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.