this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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It's based on first year reliability. Decades ago, most new cars needed service (i.e. something broke or QA missed something) in their first year. The average rate of these issues was a pretty good indicator of reliability as the car aged, although you'd need to apply a multiplier as things wore out over time.
I don't know if it's still a meaningful indicator these days.
The issue with it is it favors simple cars.
A car with ten features is less likely to have an issue than a car with 1000.
On one side yes that's a measure of likelihood of having issues.
But on the other hand if the car with ten features has a failure with each one, it's not going to be a great car to drive compared to a car with 1000 features that has failures on 11.