What Lancia shares parts with a Volkswagen?
You might know immediately. I for one had a little stab of fascination to discover there is a VW with which Lancia badges and trim could be swapped over with little effort. Any ideas?
To get you in the mood, think of the Nissan sold as an Alfa Romeo, the Arna. There’s the Lancia Ypsilon sold as a Chrysler Ypsilon. At one point a thing related to the Renault 21 had an Eagle badge and went under the name Medallion. Then we have the Fiats sold as Yugos and Ladas…. Does the Aston Martin Cygnet come in here? There….now have a guess.
Driven To Write 
Richard. It’s the VW Routan and the Lancia Voyager, sorry Phedra, an answer I could only give by cheating and looking at your Meta Links! Until then I had no knowledge of the VW’s existence. I’m always deeply unimpressed by a niche that a manufacturer want to fill, but can’t be arsed to actually develop a car for. That will soon be all of Fiat’s range, of course, but Mercedes rebadging a Renault Kangoo seems stupid, as does Opel’s rebadging Renault’s Trafic.
Ha… now that is correct but heck that Voyager is just a Chrysler with Lancia badges! I wasn’t thinking along those lines – I was thinking REAL Lancias. Pah. That stumped me (and I didn’t want to cheat with Meta Links!).
Cheat! I did leave that there deliberately though. You weren´t supposed to look at it. Nobody looks at those things.
I do.
CHEAT! CHEAT! 🙂
Well, I could have pretended …….
No, good on you for at least admitting! hehehe
I immediately thought of the Routan, I swear. And I’m ashamed of it. I need to get out more.
I am not proud of ignorance but that I didn’t know about the Touran does not trouble me. Sean: you knew about the Renecedes Kangoo. Cripes. It’s not as if they need the money like Fiat. Sad.
I’ve actually SEEN a Routan. Beat that!
Those rebadged Volkswagen are often much more reliable than their own cars. The most solid Volkswagen was the Taro – a Toyota Hilux built by VW.
On the other side, it is not a good idea letting Volkswagen built your cars. The first Ford Galaxy has the same bad reputation than his twins – the Sharan and the Alhambra.
VW has the most appalling reputation in the US. I know some of their cars are made in Brazil. According to TÜV, in 2013 VW has one car in the top 20 of the 6-7 years reliability charts. Toyota has six. Ford has three. You can read more here: http://www.anusedcar.com/index.php/tuv-report-year-age/2013-6-7/304. That is not what you expect from the advertising. “If only everything in life could be as reliable as a VW.”
Well, those TÜV reports don’t tell you too much. Or rather: They tell you more about the owners and clientele (and their maintenance approach) than the actual cars,,,
The implications of this are that Toyota owners look after their cars better and that they are less critical than owners of other brands. The same criticism is made of JD Power. Without knowing a lot about TÜV, is not likely that TÜV would want to control for this bias in their surveys? It´s elementary statistical methodology. Why would there be such a marked difference in the results for the 911 and the Cayenne when I expect the owners are quite similar sorts of people? I must admit I am sceptical about your point.
Are 911 people the same as Cayenne people? Possibly not. Correct me if I’m wrong but since the TÜV is the equivalent of a UK MOT, as Daniel suggests the faults are those that the owner can’t be bothered to spot of fix before the test. Certainly many 911 owners will spend a bit of spare time tinkering and checking that Cayenne owners don’t bother with. Also, the average Cayenne gets more use.
Dear me, there’s a good stack of Renaults down the bottom (with the BMW X5).
Yup, that bottom pile looks great eh? And shows clearly why I usually advise people never to buy any American made German cars. Note the ML and the X5 right there between all the French, Spanish and Italian built cars.
While plausible and while such variation might explain relative positioning, I don´t think that it will change the overall look of the tables. I suspect a lot of Porsche 911 owners don´t fuss a lot unless the car asks for help or a routine service is due. Most 911s just hum about doing the same thing Civics and Renaults do. Occasionally some owners thrash them but I reckon they are a small minority. I await TÜV´s answer.
While allowing for the difficulty of getting unbiased statistics, I feel that the TÜV is showing something meaningful. To a large extent, vehicle inspections capture the state of the car quite randomly. I don´t believe that there is a lot of interbrand variation in the extent people look after their cars at a given age. Most people take their car to the garage when something feels wrong. Vehicle inspections capture a lot of faults that are not noticeable. Nothing my car has ever failed for was something I could detect. So, unless you have your car inspected monthly, regular servicing will still leave you exposed to vehicle inspection failures. The TÜV is capturing faults inherent in the car´s design and not just a list of who maintains their cars best. I am now going to write to TÜV and ask them how they defend this criticism.
Another point (I assume) is that TÜV only covers safety/environmental essential items. So all those niggling things like leaking sunroofs, iffy satnavs, loose trim, etc don’t get reported.
As I mentioned somewhere before, my own subjective opinion is that is how Peugeot started their rocky descent in the quality stakes by skimping on such things whilst maintaining their overall engineering excellence. Once that was achieved without anyone seeming to notice, then they got to work on phase 2 of destroying their reputation, by downgrading the more essential engineering. Phase 3 of the plan involved sacking Pininfarina and the masterplan was complete.
It is strange that the countries who like to think of themselves (rightly or wrongly) at the top of the tech tree, are the worst at actually making anything to an acceptable degree of quality.