A brief study on the percentage of our lemon law cases per manufacturer.

Compared to past years, the changes in distribution of lemon law cases by manufacturer in 2010 were dramatic. Some of the results were really surprising, and some were expected.

If you make enough of anything, a predictable portion of them will be defective; it's simply statistics.  Even if automobile manufacturers make dramatic improvements in quality, lemon cars are with us for the foreseeable future.

It's what the manufacturer does about these statistics that determines if our favorite brands get better or worse. Quality is seldom improved by ignoring the data. Years ago the engineers at Motorola set up a scale to evaluate the quality of a process based on defect calculations. The purpose of this was to improve their manufacturing processes. The top of the scale is called Six Sigma, which equals 3.4 DPM (defects per million) units manufactured. Imagine it! If one million bricks were manufactured only 3.4 bricks would be defective: that's 99.9997% defect-free: Darn near perfect. Six sigma is the Holy Grail of quality and equally difficult to achieve.

For the record, most manufacturing processes aren't anywhere near six sigma.  A few might run at five sigma, many more at four sigma; the larger portion between three and four sigma; that's between 6,210 DPM and 66,807 DPM.

The significance of these numbers makes more sense given that the average automobile contains 15,000 to 20,000 components for something to be built out of specification. This number would be much larger if the parts inside the numerous computers, sensors and other electronic/electro-mechanical devices were included.

Norman Taylor & Associates Historic Case Data

Looking at our data since 2004 is very revealing. The following table Key Manufacturers Percentage of Lemon Law Cases by Year shows the top-six manufacturers of lemon law cases by year.

In Figure 1, below,  the bar chart shows the numbers for 2010 and for comparison, Figure 2 shows a bar chart for 2007. The differences are significant.

Figure 1 Percentage of Lemon Law Cases for 2010 at Norman Taylor & Associates

Figure 2 Percentage of Lemon Law Cases for 2007 at Norman Taylor & Associates

Factors that Alter Numbers of Lemon Law Cases Year-to-Year
Which manufacturer produces more or less lemons is altered by many more influences than we can address here. To name a few:

• The economy and the multitude of effects that reach out into the manufacturing world and the car/truck buying world.
• The behavior of manufacturers vis á vis their willingness to take responsibility when they have manufactured a lemon automobile. It varies greatly.
• Manufacturing quality errors of major suppliers.
• Total sales numbers by manufacturers would certainly have a significant effect. Not so long ago total production in the U.S. was approximately 15 million cars per year; currently it is in the area of 12 million cars per year.
• Cultural and geographic differences clearly have an effect on sales and thus on the number of lemon law cases made. For example, the number of Subaru AWD (all wheel drive) vehicles sold in the northeast is much higher than in California.

In Figure 1 the most dramatic numbers were from BMW and Toyota. If we examine the numbers in Fig. 1 for GMC and BMW we see that 23.84% of all of our lemon law cases were with BMW and 12.32% of the total lemon law cases were from GMC.  The significant number is that GM manufactures about ten times as many vehicles as BMW.

Before we get into BMW's misfortunes, look at Toyota for the same period. During the years we have data for Toyota production surpassed GM, and yet the number of lemon law cases were significantly less than GM and of course BMW. It will be interesting to see what these numbers are for 2011.

Fortunately, BMW is one of the more responsible manufacturers when it comes to dealing with a lemon vehicle and their customers. Other manufacturers, Toyota and Honda and VW come to mind, are ruthless with the customer even when they manufacture far fewer lemon vehicles. It's a puzzle. Why be arrogant and callous when there is no need?

BMW has always made pretty cars, but regrettably based on the data found in these tables and charts, they are not "The Ultimate Driving Machine" any longer. As a matter of fact German manufactured cars made up over 40% of our total cases for 2010. This is an extraordinary number worthy of a separate analysis.

Many years ago there was a sign over the entrance to the Naval Aviation Fire Fighting School in Norman, Oklahoma. It had a short, powerful message that communicated fully what happens to those who do not focus on the business at hand. It said "Learn or Burn". Next year, when we look at these statistics it will be interesting to see who learned and who burned.