VW-Enthusiast, the one aspect you keep avoiding is the severity of the 'problems' the owners are having. If -- for instance with the coil-pack fiasco -- there are only a few problems, but they leave the owner stranded at the side of the road, that is a greater quality concern than another vehicle that suffers a few CEL's (with no noticable affect on performance) and a trim piece that falls off.
Perhaps it would be interesting if you could work dollar values for all the problems into your equations as a reference point to see the significance of the problems afflicting the various cars.
That's the point I've been trying to make. When JD Powers says that 100 VWs have 335 problems and 100 Toyotas have 194 problems there is no information in there that will tell you the type of problems or their distribution (frequency distribution). You cannot calculate anything other than averages with these numbers. Not probability nor anything else. VW's numbers could be skewed higher by a small number of cars that have an inordinately large number of problems or they could all have close to 3.35 problems per car. There is not enough information to tell. Look at this Canadian Driver article form November http://www.canadiandriver.com/news/061130-6.htm that shows that Audi, Mercedes and BMW have amongst the fewest "defects/malfunctions" in a JD Power initial quality survey but BMW loses when they include "design-related problems." And even the VW Touran was the best in its class but how is that possible?
Perhaps in the #'s that you quoted, there may not be enough information.
But don't forget the fact that when the VW article was published, a great # of people signed-up for this forum just to express their misfortune with VW.
That, my friend, is enough information
for me to be really skeptical about purchasing a VW.
Oh, and BTW, almost anyone who has graduated from a high school with a Math 11 minimum could follow your simple math in your first post.
