Be Excellent To Each Other

Hmmm, HC cancelled her Sky sub just before Christmas when she discovered it was costing her £52 a month for a load of channels we never watch, a landline we never use and the internet. Basically she was on the phone for about a minute with no customer retention whatsoever.

So, with this in mind, I need to sort out new broadband in the next week or so.

Anybody got any recommendations, I'm fine on ADSL.

Plusnet have been quite OK for me so far. Got the phone and "reasonable amount of internet" package, which is 60GB.

Yeah, I once phoned Sky up to test the water and they didn't budge.

Might give them a ring soon though and see if we can change our package/deal though. TBH it's the Mrs treat having Sky+, I spend my money on Xbox live and other stuff.

JD Power is more skewed to customer satisfaction with regard to new cars rather than outright reliability, so manufacturers with dealers who provide above average customer care score higher.

Whoh whoh whoh. There's a zillion factors that might be skewing these figures. For example, what proportion of the two makes are owner-driven, as opposed to hire cars, rep cars, fleet cars, and such like? I'd suggest Ford will be rather more substantially represented in the latter class, and that those cars have a much harder life. What proportion of them are smaller/cheaper/lower-end cars that might require rather more maintenance, and how many of them are midrange solid models, and how many of them are fettled sports versions that need care and feeding? Just recording the stat against each manufacturer is fairly useless; we need to correlate it with demographics of model types and owner types to draw meaningful conclusions.

I've heard good things in the past about B* or be or whatever it's called. However when I looked recently they appeared to now be part of one of the mobile operators. Anybody know anything else about them.

Off the top of my head it appears to be toss up between the following

TalkTalk
BT
Orange
O2
Plusnet.

I don't have any complaints about the Sky broadband really, it's been pretty reliable if a little prone to slowdown occasionally which I largely blame the phone line for. However, I don't think it's possible to have just broadband from them.

I'd prefer not to have usage restrictions either.

Be are the same as O2. I'm happy with them.

You're (both) looking at it the wrong way around. You've got a 75% chance of getting a good Ford, and a 86% chance of getting a good Toyota. And that's before you start comparing a Ka to an Avensis, etc.

Land Rover don't count

[edit]Aaaand millions of people have posted. Leaving it now.

Grim...'s statement was that 25 out of 100 isn't a night and day difference between 14 out of 100.

I use BT for phone line & all calls £20 p/m

No it wasn't (as posted above), but it does read that way, so apols, etc.

And HC is on O2 so I think we get a preferential rate.
I'll investigate.

No, actually, company cars generally have a much EASIER life than privately owned vehicles. For a start, most campany cars rack up 'easy' motorway miles, as opposed to short, stop-start school runs and the like on cold engines, which are of course far harder on the car. Furthermore, your typical company car is always regularly serviced, by a main dealer, because that's a stipulation of the lease company etc. and said company cars are managed by a fleet manager etc. Many private cars do not have this luxury and/or have late services to save money etc. Also, company cars generally have all 'dints' and 'bumps' repaired, and so it goes on.

I think to dismiss the likes of Which? consumer surveys as a load of rubbish (if I understand you correctly, apologies if not), is a bit silly.

I looked at BT, specifically as I was tempted by the possibility of Fibre Optics, but they don't appear to be rolling it out here anytime in the next year or so, so they can go swivel.

I think it depends on who you speak to on the day. I tried to get free upgrades to V+ boxes from Virgin as they want to charge about £50 for installation per box to swap, even though it'll take two minutes each for our two boxes, as they use the same cables as the existing boxes. Again, I told them I was looking to swap to Sky, but the guy just said there were no deals on offer, although if I waited a couple of weeks the cost of the boxes themselves were due to drop by 50%.

[Edit] I'll probably upgrade when I get paid off from my job as it'll be a lot more convenient to have integrated HD recorders rather than the separate DVD recorders I have to use now.

Yes, you save a fiver a month. I'm on the top tier service, with 2.5meg upstream, static IP, and (as far as I can tell) no limits at all.

When your address gets Fibre To The Curb, it'll be available for all ISPs to use, not just BT's consumer offerings.

Not at all, I just think the headline number is rather simplistic if taken in isolation. I want MOAR DATAS.

Really? Huh, shows how much I use it, I guess. Are they still offering it at that price? From what they told me on the phone, this £23.99 price point is what I'll be paying every year from now on. If I hadn't made the call, I'd have been handing over £39.99 come Feb 1st.

Hmmm, might have to think about this one.

I'm not convinced they're "far" harder on the car. Yes, your shocks and brakes will wear out quicker if you're constantly speeding up and slowing down, but things like, Christ, I dunno, water pumps and exhausts will wear away at practically the same speed per mile.


I agree with this, which is one of the reasons why the Which? survey (or any that survey the consumers) can be sneered at. People are crap at answering questions.
What Car? does it much better by using data from a huge warranty company, which requires the cars to be serviced nicely.


It is a bit, but "Ford" vs "Toyota" isn't a good enough comparison, you need "08 plate Fiesta vs 08 plate Aygo" (or comparable - I think that's the teeny tiny Toyota). And consumer surveys suffer from being filled in by people that don't know what they're saying.

BT are really slow at infinity rollout. My adsl is with adsl4less £14.99 for 8mb

£35 for phone & Internet is not bad. However I can see me changing to virgin at some point this year for a faster net connection

Lemsip is nicer than throat sweets. This is probably a bad sign.

I'm not sure it its still on offer - I saw it (I think) between Christmas and New Year, and I very much considered it a "Cheque from Granny for Christmas? Money to burn?' type inducement. I don't tend to spend long hanging around in the dashboard before Nikachu begs me to play with him, to be honest.

I don't mean to be a twat here mate, but even this ain't true I would say - exhausts get fucked by corrossive condensate and that's much more of a problem on short runs where the engine and exhaust internals don't fully heat up to dissipate the initial 'nasty' condensate. Obviously on a long motorway run, all condensate is boiled off out of exhaust and cats etc. In terms of brakes, these are used far less per mile than for short, congested, stop-start runs, same goes for the gearbox, and even shocks are less used on flat, smooth, constant speed surfaces. (Plus in the case of the gearbox, the thick, viscous oil takes even longer to get up to working temp of course)

In short, I really think it is fair to say that company cars, with their long motorway mileage and regular servicing etc. have a much easier life. I bought an ex fleet Renault Laguna estate with 90,000 'easy' miles on the clock some years back, and that served me faithfully for another 60,000 miles and was still fine mechanically even then, it was just falling apart bodywork wise. Conversely, Mrs C's old Fiesta of many years back was sold for £40 scrap despite actually only logging less than 70,000 miles - engine was burning more oil than my CH and it was full of rust, less than 7 years old!

Since many more company cars are Fords than Toyotas by proportion I'm sure (and certainly historically this has always been the case), I'd have expected Fords to come out on top in the reliability stakes, as we both agree company cars have it easier. That this isn't the case, then, far from it in fact, is surely even more telling than simply taking the survey findings at face value! Car manufacturers are not the same and nor are their products, just like pretty much every other consumer durable goods you care to name. Some are much better than others, despite costing similar amounts. This is the way of things.

As for the veracity of Which?, What Car? and JD POwer surveys, I know what you're saying, they can't be perfect. But, they're all saying basically the same thing - Jap cars are much more reliable, based on completely independent, differing data sets - they can't all be fundamentally wrong. In any event, your own data is telling enough!

Got to agree with Cavey on this one. Perhaps not to the extent it used to be, but it's definitely still a fact that short journeys = more exhaust corrosion and engine wear due to running at low temperatures more often. Can't argue with thermodynamics.

Sure you can!

* sits and waits for cup of tea to spontaneously heat back up *

This is as close as mullet dog is going to get to me with something in my hand right now.

Yeah but the figures that started this discussion seemed to be about the number of breakdowns in a year not over a certain number of miles. So if more of one company's cars are rep-mobiles then it certainly could make a difference. A car that's done 30K miles in a year has a harder year than one that's done less than 10K miles, surely.

A little bit of philately for you (which will get me nowhere).

Yank friend bought some postcards yesterday and the man in the shop asked if he wanted some stamps. He came out with ones saying 'Universal Mail' rather than the usual Royal Mail ones. A look at the former's website* suggests they can be used just as normal stamps would, but it's the first time I've ever seen them. Strange days, indeed...

( * http://www.universalmail.co.uk/home )

The whole "short run" thing is less of a factor with modern cars - exhausts heat up in a matter of minutes, and lubricants work far better at lower temperatures. It certainly used to be an issue, but not so much of one any more. Also mechanical things have improved - for instance, the VW Toureg has a diesel heater to bring the autobox up to temperature within just a few minutes.
I'm pleased to see you go on to agree with me about shocks and things, even though you thought I'd said the opposite

But yes, some car manufacturers, as a whole, have a more reliable fleet than others. But not by that much (Land Rover blah blah), and model to model comparisons are closer than fleet to fleet ones. We can even give Land Rover a bit of slack here, as randomly grabbing a big Audi 4x4 (the All Road) and comparing it to a Discovery 4 shows that the Discovery 4 is a fair bit more reliable (also, the data from the warranty company suggests the All Road is pretty much as bad as it can be, but the consumer data for the same car seems to put it firmly in the top 25% ).

Tellingly, if you compare a Toyota Avensis to a Mondeo, there's practically no difference.

Sort of proof - I can't link to the page directly and I promise I haven't moved the arrows



Here's a link to the Mondeo page of the website: http://www.reliabilityindex.com/reliability/search/69

The Audi 4x4 has a reliability index of 287 - 100 is average

On re-reading that it sounds like I'm writing spam. I'm not, it's just something I hadn't seen before and was wondering if anyone had any experience with them

Jesus. I went over to the wee canteen thing to get some overpriced food, and when I went to the till, the smiley lady who's usually there wasn't. Because she's dead.

Of course these are for warranties sold after the manufacturer's warranty has expired and they often cover a more limited range of stuff. So a particular model could have bits of trim falling off and other various minor things going wrong and it may not show up there. Even so if you look at this:

http://www.reliabilityindex.com/top-100

It rather supports the idea that Japanese cars are generally better.

Grim... mate, you've just posted figures that show a Ford is twice as likely to break down as a Toyota, and a Range Rover four times as likely, over the same distance. That alone pretty much dispels the whole 'all cars are basically the same' argument.

Furthermore, every consumer study I have ever read, not just one or two but dozens, from the mid-80s to the present time, from a variety of reputable, disparate sources both UK and internationally, put the big Jap manufacturers waaaayyy out in front of everyone else - it's how they built their businesses in the first place, they did the same to the Brit bike industry a decade or two beforehand.

I've tried to suggest reason(s) why this should be so, based on my admittedly limited experience beyond simply owning various cars (which I accept would be insufficient), but as I've said, I have visited and studied at length various major car manufacturing processes around the world, albeit indirectly and not for reasons of quality control per se, as part of my job.

It really is a case of 'nuff said' mate; I don't have anything further to add to this increasingly circular discussion and I believe the point is now well made.

I agree with that entirely - what I'm saying is that it makes a lot less difference than people are suggesting. You've got to be pretty unlucky to get a new car that isn't damn reliable (this coming from someone that had a brand new Mazda 6 blow up on him), no matter who put it together.

Does that site have problem severity? I've had a poke about, but couldn't see anything.

I've also posted figures that show a Toyota and a Ford or a Land Rover and an Audi are basically exactly the same, but feel free to ignore them


It's you're use of words like "waaaayyy" that are making you wrong.


Yeah, by me

It has average repair costs and a breakdown of the types of problems. It also has a disclaimer that they have hardly any data for some models so things like the Audi 4x4 might be very skewed. I agree that modern cars are generally very reliable, though. Certainly it's not like if you compared an Austin Princess with a German contemporary.

Thanks Mark, there's a whole stack of stuff here from a variety of sources, all saying Jap (and Korean) cars are by far the most reliable, unsurprisingly.

Ford have at least two entries in the top 10 most unreliable cars, and none in the most relaible - but they aren't the worst by a long chalk - that'll be Land Rover, then.

(Porsche are shit too! )

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/most-reliable-cars

Has he got me on ignore?
I used pictures, man! Pictures!


Don't worry about that - fast cars (and 4wd cars) are harder to make than hatchbacks, hence the horrific placements.

Yeah but I know what Grim..'s saying too. You need to be fairly unlucky to experience a lot of breakdowns in a modern car so it isn't quite the factor it once was. Also, which would you consider to be the Japanese manufacturers these days? In many cases so many parts and plants are shared that it seems a bit unlikely that there's any difference at all.

No, I'm sticking to entire manufacturer's, not just cherry picking one model or another - that's surely a much more valid approach when saying 'in general, manufacturer A produces more reliable cars than manufacturer B'.

Like I said mate, 'nuff said, your own figures say it all - glad we put that old chestnut to rest. And yes, 52% vs. 14% is of 'night and day' statistical significance; imagine if these were vote percentages at a general election, I doubt many people would be saying 'there's not much in it'...

That's true, the Auris and the Avensis are made in Derby, I think.

Oh right. I totally agree with you, then.

You also keep skewing my figures like a politician (this post explains why), but I guess that's what you wish you were

Modern cars are more reliable than older ones? Sure, I agree wholeheartedly, but that's an entirely different argument altogether and one I don't dispute.

The point is, some new car manufacturers demoinstrably produce more reliable products than others, sector for sector, class for class, as evidenced by a myriad of diligent consumer surveys and the like, even though they are all of them much more reliable than cars of 20 or 30 years ago, or whatever.

LoL, I'm only quoting your figures mate, not skewing them. Anyway, I'd never make it as a politician mate - too many skeletons in the cupboard and no-one would vote for me anyway.

No, you're quoting MarkG's take on my figures.

And I'd totally fucking vote for you.

Get a seat in the Lords.

Meh, cheers mate!

Although, of course, he'd rather be in a Diet

LOL

That's about the only Lords I'll be getting into at any point.

Your mum enters Lor-['BANG! BANG! BANG!']