Last year, Consumer Report ranked all the car manufacturers on quality of repair on their complete line, not just one of their selected vehicles. Chrysler ranked dead last, next to last was GM and Ford ranked 3rd from last.
I believe Subaru was ranked first followed by Honda and Toyota. In my opinion, you really cannot talk about quality on a vehicle unless it has been trouble free for over 100,000 miles. At least those are my standard.
Bo-man wrote: My friend bought a new Chrysler 300 for his wife, 3 years later sold it for less than half of what he paid for it...
Must have needed cash badly to make such a bad deal.
My 2006 Chrysler 300C has just been a superb vehicle. And its still worth about 3/4 of what I paid for it, counting the clean retail price. No repairs ever, and great performance.
I never put too much stock in these consumer type reports on vehicles because there are just so many variables in what each particular person likes or dislikes about any given vehicle.
As far as customer satisfaction, the Dodge/Chrysler dealers I have dealt with since owning the vehicle have been excellent.
I too love my 2006 Chrysler 300c . Bought it over a year ago. It had only 11,000 miles and looked like new. Still does. It drives beautifully. We get more admiring comments on it than I did on my Lexus..
Barb
2001 Chev. 3500 CC Duallie, D/A, 20.5 Pullrite Super 5th, Roll n Lock, StarBoards, Firestone Air Bags, TTT Mirrors, BrakeSmart.
2004 HitchHiker Discover America 33 1/2 CKQG, Disc Brakes, Mor/Ryde IS
Garmin Nuvi 350
It fits my experience with the four Chrysler Corp and Daimler-Chrysler products I've bought. But I've done worse with GM and Ford some years (mid-80s), better more recently (since early '90s).
You are probably looking at initial quality ratings. My issues in most cases have been past that stage, more that some parts were engineered for a shorter life than I would have wanted (50,000 to 100,000 miles) and all but the '86 Olds and '87 Sable would have been fine if I had been leasing for 18-24 months rather than trying to make them last 8-12 years.
I have a different perspective as a used-car lot owner, since I sell/drive all brands; as 2-yr-old cars, I feel that Ford and Chevy make better models with nicer features and MUCH BETTER FUEL MILEAGE. The one place where Dodge really shines is their minivans - nobody seems to make one as nice or that utilizes every possible nook and cranny for storage space (I drove an '09 with 140,000 miles last night, and it was really great!). My son owns a 3/4 ton Diesel Ram Mega Cab 4x4 that has suffered WAY too many major part failures, as compared to our Ford Diesel with twice the miles.
Re: Wranglers - my 2000 Wrangler had a quirk where the dashboard would just stop working. Some online sleuthing produced oodles of posts implying this was a fairly common problem that Chrysler had been ignoring for 5 years - it seems it was easier to issue a TSB than actually fix the dashboard installation problem in the factory....
So yeah - I can see where they would be on the bottom of the heap. Will I buy a Wrangler again?? Oh yeah - in a heartbeat. It's still a really fun little beast :-)
We had a '96 Dodge Dakota --- 217,000 miles when we traded it off for a 2000 Dodge Dakota -- it now has 175,000 miles on it. We have a PT Cruiser with almost 60,000 miles on them. (I think we drive too much!!!).We had NO trouble with any of these vehicles. We traded the first Dakota off to get one with more power to pull a larger 5th wheel.
We are satisfied customers and as someone else said above "they didn't poll us"!!!!!
It is hard to convince anyone who has invested their money in any brand vehicle and received good service from it that theirs is inferior. There were even a few people who thought the Yugo was not all that bad.
In the 2008 time frame when the auto bailout was being hashed out, it was widely discussed that Chrysler quality fell behind both Ford and GM. Chrysler executives freely admitted this fact before Congress and the President's Task Force. Not because of a lack of effort but rather a case of economics.
One of the problems when Fiat entered the picture was their abysmal quality record in Europe. How were they to bring Chrysler to the modern day quality level expected when they evidently lacked the expertise to accomplish this on their own. Ultimately, mainly because they as it turned out were the only people who really bid on Chrysler, they won the sweepstakes and basically got Chrysler free.
By all measurables Fiat has tremendously improved Chrysler quality. They realized this to be a necessary step to achieve any success. I do though think that they would even agree it is not yet to the level they would aspire to.
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