Hyundai and Kia Owners Report Denied Claims Twice as Often as Nissan Owners.
The brands whose owners report the most refusals are the brands that promise the most coverage. That is not the contradiction it appears to be.
Complaints Mentioning a Software Update Grew Fivefold in Fifteen Years.
A recall used to mean a part. Increasingly it means a calibration, delivered over the air, leaving no physical trace on the car you are inspecting.
The Side Impact Barrier Got Heavier and Faster. Two Thirds of Top Scores Disappeared.
The old side impact test used a barrier modelled on a mid-2000s SUV. Rebuilding it around what people actually drive now removed the top score from most of the cars that had it.
Automatic Braking Is on Almost Every New Car. One in Five Systems Rates Poor or Marginal.
Two cars can both advertise automatic emergency braking and perform completely differently when tested against a pedestrian at night. The badge on the window sticker says nothing about which one you have.
A Third of Cars Have Headlights Rated Poor or Marginal. At Cadillac, Four in Five.
Crash stars measure what happens during an impact. Headlight ratings measure whether you saw the thing you hit. The two scores disagree more often than most buyers realise, and one of them almost never appears in a listing.
The Average Jeep Fails Three Safety Tests. The Average Mazda Fails None.
Any single safety test can be an outlier. Counting failures across six separate evaluations per vehicle removes that excuse, and the results separate the market far more sharply than any individual score.
95% of Dealers Sell One Brand. The Exceptions Are Almost All Stellantis.
The franchised dealer model is usually described as one brand, one building. It mostly is — and the places where it breaks explain a distortion that shows up in every count of dealers by brand.
One GMC Sierra Weighs 2,000kg. Another, Same Year, Weighs 3,919.
A model name is treated as if it described a vehicle. On the specification sheets it frequently describes a range, and the range on some models is wider than the gap between entire vehicle classes.
A Large Sedan Has More Cabin Than a Small SUV. And a Third of the Boot.
The reason people moved from sedans to crossovers is usually described as space. Split the measurement into cabin and boot and the sedan wins one half outright — which means the trade was never about room for people.
Every Land Rover Can Tow. No Mercedes Can.
Towing capability splits the market in a way nothing else does. It is not about size, price or drivetrain — two similarly sized luxury SUVs can sit on opposite sides of the line.
Tesla Has 3x More Dealers Than Its Share of the Used Market
A brand's dealer count and its presence on the used market should track each other. For most brands they do. Where they diverge, the gap says something specific about how the brand sells cars.
Cars Gained 45% in Weight and 29% in Volume. The Rest Is Density.
Everyone knows cars got heavier and everyone assumes it is because they got bigger. Measure both and the size increase only accounts for two-thirds of it. The rest went inside the same volume.