On Wednesday evenings through the winter I play cards with some of the guys from my summer golf group. We start the evening talking about Trump, (because how can you not?), but after that the conversation can wander almost anywhere. Recently it came around to the attack on Canada’s auto industry by the aforementioned orange idiot, and one of the guys commented about the decline of the Big Three. I don’t remember my exact wording, but I made a disparaging remark that linked the decline in Chrysler/Ford/GM fortunes to their inability to produce high quality vehicles. 

Bad move! I forgot that one of my card-playing buddies had retired from the automobile industry and he responded sharply to that comment, claiming I might have been right 30 or 40 years ago, but it wasn’t true any more.

I felt bad. I know that I am defensive about Bruce Power specifically and the nuclear power industry at large,  and I don’t like it when either are attacked, so I should have been more sensitive. I thought about bragging about my current car which is a 2012 Lexus. It now has almost 14 years and 180,000 Km on it, and that car still drives like a new car – tight, firm and solid on the road. No rattles, no buzzes, no vibrations. I rarely need to fix anything. It may be the last car I ever own, because I can’t find a plausible excuse for getting rid of it. 

I didn’t trot out that example, because it’s just one point of anecdotal evidence, and I find that one-point graphs rarely prove anything. So I just let the conversation slide on to something else. But I made a mental note to look into it to see where quality lies in the auto industry now.

Any good debater understands that anecdotal evidence isn’t very compelling. You need data. So I set out to find some data. 

I tried to confine my queries to Canadian data only, where possible. Let’s face it, Canadian road and weather conditions are tough on vehicles. It’s easy to be rust free if you’re in Arizona. But it wasn’t always possible to rely totally on Canadian experience.

I started by trying to identify the best selling vehicles in Canada. I found the data surprising. Cars make up only about 12% of vehicle sales in Canada. SUVs are 59%, pickup trucks are 24%, with  vans and mini-vans accounting for 4%. 

I decided to treat pickup trucks as a different data set for a couple of reasons. First, there isn’t a lot of value in truck data as a discriminator of the Big Three (Ford, GM, Stellantis which runs Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep) because those companies  dominate the pickup market to the extent that there’s little competitor data to contrast. Second, the pickup is a significantly different beast, isn’t it? My research indicates that there’s more complexity in car and SUV designs than there is in pickups. So I’ll come back to them.

Given that cars are only 12% of the market and family vans are an even smaller niche market, I might have simply looked at SUV’s, but I didn’t go that way. I chose to try to gather data on the broad sweep of non-truck vehicle data. After all, a lot of historical data on vehicle performance is driven by the cars that were sold 15 or 20 years back.

My next chore was to decide what kind of data I was interested in. I think there are three things that we think of when we talk about vehicle quality. First, how good was it when it was new? Second, how hard was it to keep it on the road? (That particular question breaks down into two – how often did it break, and how expensive was it to fix whatever broke?).  And lastly, how tough was it – how many years and/or kilometres did I get out of it?

The first kind of data comes from indices like the JD Powers index of customer complaints. My AI companion points out that these complaints are not often serious problems. They include things like new owners not understanding their electronic displays, and lots of minor glitches that don’t really affect the ability to drive the car. 

JD Power also produces a listing of how much maintenance was needed by the three year mark. They produce a metric of how many actual problems (as opposed to complaints) have happened in each brand and they document them as problems per hundred vehicles (pp100). Consumer Reports digs a little deeper than JD Power, in that they track vehicle problems well past that three year horizon. Similarly, the Automobile Protection looks at longer term maintenance issues and does so with a Canadian focus.

There is a website for an organization called Vincentric which, per their “About Us” section “provides data, knowledge, and insight to the automotive industry by identifying and applying the many aspects of automotive ownership costs.” They track both scheduled maintenance (oil changes and the like) and breakdown maintenance issues and they compute a total cost of owning and operating a vehicle based on the expected sum of scheduled and predicted breakdown maintenance. Similarly, Repair Pal, a US based website produces assessments of maintenance costs based on frequency and severity of maintenance costs for millions of vehicles.

That missing link here is now the endurance test – which vehicles really last? That information is available from IHS Markit registration data and from iSeecars survival surveys. When I asked my AI assistant for analysis, I got a table of scrappage rates which shows us the fraction of vehicles that are still on the road after ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. I also found data on the  average km on the clock when vehicles get scrapped.

My AI assistant spewed out reams of information in response to my queries. It seemed like every response triggered another question from me. Eventually I got it to assemble a table to summarize all the findings for non-pickup vehicles, which I will share with you shortly. Before I do, however, allow me to toss in a few caveats that you should understand. 

First, it’s clear that I’m not aways comparing apples to apples. I’m looking at data across twenty years or more, and the automobile industry has changed a lot in those twenty years, and continues to change rapidly. The fact that we’re making more SUV’s than cars, for example, is a big change. The first year that SUV and mini-van sales exceeded cars was 2014. 

The conversion to hybrids and EV’s is complicating the comparisons too. Full EV’s have very few moving parts which reduces scheduled and breakdown maintenance. However, EV’s have introduced new failure mechanisms like battery problems and glitches in complicated electronic systems. And since those are fairly new mechanisms, there is an improvement trend in the EV world which doesn’t get reflected in longer term views of EV’s.  Light (regenerative braking) hybrids are scoring very well on maintenance reviews because the braking systems are reducing the costs of brake pad and rotor replacements as well as easing the load for the ICE motor in those cars. Oddly, plug-in hybrids are scoring badly by comparison because those vehicles manage to combine all the failure mechanisms of a full ICE vehicle with all the failure mechanisms of a full EV.

I had intended to keep luxury brands separate from more modest models, but in the end it was simpler to construct a single table that includes everything that isn’t a pickup truck. Having sifted through the data, here’s what I got.

Brand	Reliability Score (0-100)	10-Year Maint. Total (CAD)	Major Repair Probability	Avg. Lifetime (KM)	Survival Rate (20 Years)
Toyota	66	$5,470	13.5%	415,000	45%
Lexus	60	$7,110	17.2%	390,000	35%
Honda	59	$6,799	17.7%	385,000	38%
Subaru	63	$7,291	17.7%	360,000	31%
Tesla	49	$5,867	14.2%	310,000	N/A
Hyundai	45	$7,024	21.1%	315,000	12%
Mazda	55	$7,381	18.4%	305,000	18%
Buick	51	$8,993	24.5%	295,000	14%
VW	41	$6,764	20.9%	305,000	15%
Chevrolet	47	$9,602	26.3%	290,000	15%
Ford	44	$10,313	28.4%	280,000	9%
BMW	58	$16,021	34.1%	295,000	9%
Stellantis*	38	$11,350	31.1%	210,000	7%

Some comments on that table.

1. The reliability score is a weighted score that relies heavily on Consumer Reports “trouble areas” breakdown data. It mostly addresses my first question about “How good was it when you got it?” It includes “nuisance level problems” as well as early mechanical breakdowns.

2. The “10 year maintenance” column is not a sum of historic failures for all years across all brands. It is a prediction of the future maintenance costs of the 2026 models. It is based, of course, on past failure rates, parts costs, shop costs, scheduled maintenance etc, but it’s more forward looking than backward looking. So this is the “how hard to keep it on the road?”part.

3. Don’t believe the average lifetime km data. It’s the average lifetime km for cars that didn’t die from a number of reasons like collisions. I understand that exclusion, but they also excluded rusting issues, and I believe that is because the rust issue is a mostly Canadian phenomenon, and so they took it out to allow “mechanical” issues to dominate the data. So the data is skewed to higher lifetime km than actual, but I believe that the trend of this data is valid. This column, along with the data about 20 year survival rate tells us which vehicles have been built to last.

4. Broadly speaking, the Asian cars are still kicking the crap out of North American and European cars. They have fewer complaints about their initial quality and fewer breakdowns, they project lower ten year maintenance costs, they are less likely to have a very expensive repair problem, and they stay on the road forever. 

OK, so what about the truck market? What’s happening there?

Trucks are where the Big 3 automakers are focused. The top selling vehicles for the Big 3 are all pickup trucks. The Big 3 are choosing to build pickups because they have a bigger profit margin on trucks than on cars. Profit margin on small cars might be as low as $500, while profits on a large pickup may be in the $10000 to $15000 range. That bigger profit margin is based on a number of things.  Cars are more likely to be engineered for driving performance and comfort than trucks are, and an expensive car is generally even more technologically complex. It might have more expensive alloys, more complicated suspension systems etc. All that complexity bites into profit margin. 

By contrast, the premise for truck design is is simple and rugged construction. An expensive truck is a dressed up version of a base model truck. It might have nicer leather seats and a better sound system, but it rides on the same bones as the base model. Manufacturers cash in big on the appeal of that dressed up pickup.

More importantly, competition in the pickup market is heavily restricted by a 25% import tariff, which has been in place since 1964. Toyota Tacomas, (assembled in Mexico) are competing strongly in the light pickup market, (in fact they outsell the Ford Ranger/Maverick and Chevy Colorado/GMC Canyon). However, the Toyota Tundra accounts for only about 5% of the full-sized pickup market. Otherwise, the big 3 still dominate the pickup world.

Here’s how the pickup world looks for quality measures.

Vehicle Model	Segment	Avg. Lifespan (Years/KM)	Prob. of 400k+ KM	10-Year Maint. (CAD)	Market Share
Toyota Tacoma	Mid-Size	19.2 / 380,000	25.3%	$6,150	6.5%
Chevy Colorado	Mid-Size	15.5 / 285,000	7.0%	$9,200	4.3%
Ford Ranger	Mid-Size	14.8 / 275,000	5.9%	$8,840	2.1%
Toyota Tundra	Half-Ton	17.5 / 355,000	30.0%	$8,550	5.4%
GM Silverado/Sierra	Half-Ton	17.2 / 330,000	18.8%	$12,300	29.1%
Ford F-150	Half-Ton	16.8 / 315,000	15.8%	$13,200	34.8%
Ram 1500 (Gas)	Half-Ton	14.5 / 285,000	11.5%	$14,500	14.2%
Ram 3500 (Cummins)	Heavy Duty	21.0 / 485,000	39.7%	$24,500	2.5% **

You can see that in both segments, mid-size and half ton, the Toyotas are producing the best quality profiles. The Tacoma is now dominant in mid-size truck sales. The Tundra, despite impressive lifespan data, has not taken over the half ton market yet, which sounds like more of triumph for marketing and tariff protection than it does for the quality of the product.

Why the heck are North American manufacturers still suffering in quality comparisons? Let’s face it, this competition started over sixty years ago. Shouldn’t we have caught up by now? I would suggest that there are three basic reasons. 

The first is that the Americans still believe that bigger is better. When Japanese cars first came to these shores, they were dismissed as disposable toy cars, and the Americans continued to focus on muscle cars and large family cars. my impression of those years was that whenever the Americans did introduce a mid-size or compact car, it would inevitably grow larger in subsequent model years. There was an embedded arrogance that caused the Americans to dismiss the threat of Japanese imports and that arrogance allowed those brands to gain a secure foothold in this market. You might expect that both the arrogance and the “big is better” notion would be gone by now, but I’m not convinced. In the current vehicle fleets, the huge pickup trucks are what they like to sell. Smaller vehicles in their fleet are there to meet fleet emissions regulations, not because they want to sell smaller cars with lower profit margins. Bigger is still better and it’s costing them.

The second reason is structural. By 1970, the American auto industry had been churning out cars since Henry Ford’s first assembly line in 1913. In the 70’s, when the small imports were producing cars from new, modern, start-up plants, the Big 3 fought back with vehicles produced in huge old plants. The “huge” descriptor is important because it means that they had a great amount of stranded capital invested in those plants. You couldn’t just magically liquidate all those assets and build something better right away. And the “old” is also significant, because it tended to lock the Big 3 into ways of doing things that were consistent with the plants they were working in.

The third reason lies in the American assembly line philosophy. Henry Ford’s first assembly line was credited with reducing a car’s build time from more than twelve hours to something like 1 hour and 33 minutes. Assembly line speed became the key to lowering costs and raising profits. When automobile customers began to demand higher quality, the solution in the American plants was to keep building fast, and then to inspect, and weed out quality problems. The Toyota plants, on the other hand, had a mechanism whereby any worker could, and was encouraged to, stop the assembly line if a quality defect was detected.  They didn’t try to weed out defects – they tried to prevent them.

Does all this mean that you should buy the Asian brands? Not necessarily. Initial cost and your pattern of use are significant factors. If you plan on leasing, or trading in after five years or less, then that long term endurance matters less. Perhaps initial purchase price matters more then. Or perhaps you just love your BMW handling and sporty feel too much to switch. But if you want quality, buy Toyota or Honda. 

And if you want to stand up for Canada’s auto industry – also buy Toyota or Honda! Why? Because more than 60% of Ontario’s automobile industry workers are employed by the Japanese companies.

According to the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing (Western University), and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), in 2025, Honda and Toyota produced 77% of all vehicles made in Canada. In contrast, Ford, GM, and Stellantis combined produced only 23%. 

And there is a higher Canadian content in the parts used in Toyota and Honda assembly plants for their high volume models like the Rav4, CRV, Honda CR-V and Lexus NX/RX. The Big 3 plants in Canada are typically assembling high value parts brought in from the US mid-west, whereas the Honda and Toyota plants are building with motors and castings made in Ontario. And the American companies are treating Canadian assembly lines as branch plants – starting them up and shutting them down as US sales demand dictates. By contrast the Honda and Toyota plants in Canada are parent plants for their North American efforts.

It’s time to stop thinking of cars as “Asian” or “import”. We’re making those cars in Canada. It’s time Canadians  take credit for our quality products. And maybe ignoring American vehicles on our vehicle sales lots would be even more impactful than taking American wine and spirits out of our liquor stores.

So that’s it. My friend made me curious and that’s what I discovered. Since my wife and I own a Toyota and a Lexus, I’m a happy guy.