Let’s imagine you buy a small car for $30,000 and your partner buys an SUV for $60,000. You drive them both for 200k miles, and then at that point they both have a big engine problem and need $10k of work each to fix.
At that point, spending $10k to keep the SUV going seems perhaps reasonable, because it is 1/6th of the SUVs price.
Spending 10k on the car is less reasonable because it’s a whole THIRD of the car’s purchase price! Makes much more sense to scrap it and put that money towards a brand-new car.
Therefore, people will be more likely to keep expensive vehicles for longer, scrap cheaper ones sooner, and this skews the data.
Of course, I’m not saying the vehicles in the chart are all just expensive and not reliable. Toyota Landcruser there at #1 is legendarily indestructible, for good reason. But there are other factors involved beyond pure reliability which will skew the stats.
Yes, but the cost is different in relative terms.
Let’s imagine you buy a small car for $30,000 and your partner buys an SUV for $60,000. You drive them both for 200k miles, and then at that point they both have a big engine problem and need $10k of work each to fix.
At that point, spending $10k to keep the SUV going seems perhaps reasonable, because it is 1/6th of the SUVs price.
Spending 10k on the car is less reasonable because it’s a whole THIRD of the car’s purchase price! Makes much more sense to scrap it and put that money towards a brand-new car.
Therefore, people will be more likely to keep expensive vehicles for longer, scrap cheaper ones sooner, and this skews the data.
Of course, I’m not saying the vehicles in the chart are all just expensive and not reliable. Toyota Landcruser there at #1 is legendarily indestructible, for good reason. But there are other factors involved beyond pure reliability which will skew the stats.