GM, Chrysler Post Quality Improvements

General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Group LLC brands notch a 10% gain in initial quality, despite both auto makers filing for bankruptcy, J.D. Power and Associates says.

The improvement reported in the 2009 Initial Quality Study surpasses the 8% overall industry gain, a feat that surprised David Sargent, vice president-automotive research at J.D. Power.

“There's a positive disconnect between the turbulence going on in the business side of those companies and people coming in every day to design and build high-quality vehicles,” he says at an Automotive Press Assn. event in Detroit.

“They prefer to get on with their job and divorce themselves from the trauma, and I think that's quite remarkable.

“There's really no correlation between what's happened financially to a company this year and how they performed in the study,” he adds.

Jamie Hresko, GM's vice president-quality, says the auto maker's current financial troubles have actually helped boost quality.

The annual study, now in its 23rd year, measures customer satisfaction during the first 90 days of vehicle ownership. The 2009 IQS results were calculated from responses from more than 80,000 owners and lessees of '09 vehicles.

The study also bestows awards on the world's top assembly plants based on average levels of defects and malfunctions of vehicles.

Toyota Motor Corp.'s Lexus luxury brand took top rankings with a reported average of 84 problems per 100 vehicles in 2009, improving 15 PP100 and moving up two spots from last year. The industry average for 2009 is 108 PP100.

Following Lexus were Porsche (90), Cadillac (91), Hyundai (95) and Honda (99).

Hyundai's strong showing stemmed from the launch of the Genesis sedan, Sargent says.

The Toyota brand finished seventh with 101 PP100, while the Ford brand came in eighth with 102.

Of all nameplates, Suzuki posted the biggest gain this year, improving from 32nd place last year to ninth in 2009 with an average 103 PP100.

In the car category, domestics and imports were tied statistically in initial quality. In trucks, domestics fared slightly better than imports. However, imports performed considerably better than domestics in the cross/utility vehicle category.