So here we go with the second installment of our analysis of Consumer Reports magazine’s dot charts of late model used car repair incidence. (Here’s the first one, in case you missed it). We are now solidly into the 1960s, and the results remind us of the old proverb, “The first shall be last, and the last first.”
Pages from Consumer Reports, April 1966. (Click images to enlarge)
Observations:
–The most reliable used car now is . . . the 1963 Plymouth Valiant with a six. (The legends are true!) So Plymouth goes from worst to first.
–Among big cars, the 1961 Buick Le Sabre is tops in reliability. (Big improvement over ’57).
–1960 Pontiac and Olds also have excellent records (except for carburetor).
–Most trouble-prone new car . . . 1965 Chevrolet full-size V-8. Shocking because Chevy in the ’50s used to make some of the most reliable cars of their time. Cadillac quality isn’t quite what it used to be either.
–Ford Motor Company products (Ford, Mercury, Lincoln), generally fair to poor in the ’50s, are still giving owners more problems than other makes.
–Foreign car ratings, included in the 1964 issue, are strangely absent in 1966. But that omission will be corrected in upcoming years.
Tried and true–1963 Plymouth Valiant.
1961 Buick Le Sabre–the quality is there.
I remember a few 1960 Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles still tooling around in the 1980s. (And some 1960 Chevrolets too!)
Looks so nice here–hard to believe this ’61 T-Bird is such a bomb!
Chevrolet for ’65 “has the look that time cannot wash away.” However, new car buyers are discovering a lot of hidden problems under the sheetmetal.
Fords, often below par in reliability and rust resistance in the ’50s, continue to have a large number of dark circles in the ’60s. Hence the unflattering acronyms for F O R D which we all know and I won’t repeat here.
Technically, Studebaker is still selling cars in 1966, and many early ’60s Larks and Hawks would still be on the road. However, CR doesn’t even include a Studebaker chart this year. So CR is saying: A used Studebaker? Worthless! Don’t even bother!
1966 new cars:
Consumer Reports tested the new 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado for this issue. Despite enthusiasm for this model among car collectors, the CR staff wasn’t too impressed.
Front wheel drive and looks–that’s about it.
Best luxury car: 1966 Imperial
CR prefers the 6-cylinder Mustang over the V-8! Interesting . . .
Did you know that Consumer Reports rated movies? Best movies of the year include: Dr. Zhivago, The Eleanor Roosevelt Story, The Great Race, My Fair Lady, Sound of Music, and That Darn Cat. Some of the worst-rated movies are: Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, Harum Scarum (starring Elvis Presley), How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Planet of the Vampires, Plague of the Zombies, Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster . . . oh, and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine–hmmmm, that sounds interesting!
Next in the series: the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Thanks for sharing these, Stephen. It looks like my fleet average is about average; fortunately, my T-Bird is a ’63, so they worked some of the bugs out. The ’65 Dart is the high scorer for me – way to go Dirty Dart!
Amazing how many cars that were just one model year old were having rust problems already. And it is not just a Ford problem either – pretty much every manufacturer was making their share of rust buckets.
Big Chevy owners reported way more rattles than Pontiacs which had the same basic body. Probably had to do with the willowy (and less safe) X frame dating back to 1958. Not sure when it went away.
I noticed a lot of muffler problems. Well, they were mostly plain steel, not aluminized or galvanized or anything else. And water is a product of combustion. Short trips equaled short muffler life. And car warrantees were way shorter.
CR car reports are now much less specific about where the problems are.
Also, leaded gasoline exhaust is much more aggressively corrosive than unleaded, and there was a lot more sulphur in the gasoline back then, too, which makes sulphuric acid in the exhaust.
My father, who was real car guy, used to plan on replacing the muffler every 2 years. That was in Toronto in the 60s, so lots of salt. He expected 4 years from the rest of the exhaust, but only 2 years from the battery.
I’m amazed at the comparative reliability of the Mopars given their reputation. At various times I owned a few cars of of that era. Those cars included a ’60 Valiant, ’62 Olds 98, ’62 Buick Electra 225, ’62 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, ’64 Ford Galaxy 500, & ’64 Chrysler New Yorker. Since they were all well used by the time I got them, they were presumably some of the better survivors. I remember all of them as being pretty reliable despite their age and mileage. The Cadillac sticks out as having an electrical short that would drain the battery. Fixed by wiring in a cutout switch to the accessory electrical circuit. The Chrysler was the oldest one when I owned it back in 1981-82. Appearance wise, it was a real beater, but you couldn’t fault the powertrain. The Olds had a flaky transmission, but it never failed. The Valiant was a great running car but a real rust bucket. The Ford had a 352. Sold that one to a friend when we both graduated college. He promptly moved to Arizona to accept his first job at a Kingman newspaper. Despite using a lot of gas to produce relatively modest acceleration, the Ford was a good reliable car. The Buick was an outlier. I bought it from my boss who thought the engine had a cracked block. It didn’t and I fixed it by replacing the head gasket. It was a very well cared for car and I had no problems with it right up until the engine threw a rod. Then it really did have a cracked block. It was the only one of the cars I ended up junking. All the others lived on with subsequent owners. Even the Chrysler was sellable. I was thinking it was in such bad shape I’d never find a buyer, but my boss at the time bought it for his son who was turning 16. Given the stout mechanicals and lack of any dent free body panels, it probably wasn’t a bad choice as a 1st ride for a new teenage driver.
CR did not like the Roto-Hydramatic even when it was new in ’61. They recommended to anyone who wanted to buy a ’61 Pontiac to select a Star Chief or Bonneville (and not the Catalina), because those models still had the old 4-speed Hydramatic.
My opinion: the 4-speed Hydramatic was at its best in 58, 59, & 60.
The idea that camshafts, valves, and piston rings have high and low reliability in the first few years of ownership must mean something. Basic engineering, assembly quality, materials quality, or “all of the above”? All at a level so far below the common expectations of today…
I can’t imagine that those categories still exist, or, if they do, that likely almost all of the readership would not even know what they are and what they do.
Earlier state of every involved art, including product durability/dependability testing. And the severely lousy engine oil and dirty-burning gasoline available at the time made an unhappy marriage with maintenance practices that could run from slack to harebrained.
I forgot all about the movie ratings, which IIRC continued well into the ’70s, along with a blurb like “CR makes no judgment about films; we’re just reporting how subscribers rated them” or some such; don’t remember movie critics’ opinions being mixed in.
This issue went to press just around when Studebaker announced they were ending car production, not sure if it was before or after. CR did include a 1964 Lark sedan in a comparison test of American small cars that year, and they noted they bought the car before the South Bend closure announcement was made. The car did passibly well in their tests but not enough to recommend buying one under the circumstances. I think that was their last acknowledgement of Studebakers.
Weirdest thing here is how most 65-66 Dodge Dart V8s are lemons, while Plymouth Valiants with the same engine are superbly reliable.
(Taking a second look at the Dart V8 chart not sure if those are grey dots or black dots – the contrast between them on some charts isn’t good on my screent).
The 64-65 Dodge Dart V-8 dots are shaded “averages”, not the solid black dots. It’s a little hard to tell the difference in the computer scanned images. The 64-65 Plymouth Valiant V-8s have a similar record.
C’mon, what is this, amateur hour? If this quarrel is worth having, it’s worth having right: One team line up along one side of the road and holler FoMoCo!, and the other team line up facing them on the other side of the road and holler back FoNoGo!. Back and forth and back and forth until the winner is determined, or the streetlights come on and everyone has to get home or else get in trouble with mom and dad. Whichever comes first.
I wonder if CR considered the statistical imbalance of their method. CR subscribers were CAREFUL buyers who read the articles, bought the low-dot cars, and drove them CAREFULLY. So the high-dot cars were naturally unrepresented unless they were surprises. If Ford sixes had been reliable for several years, then suddenly turned bad this year, they would show up in CR.
It is interesting how well Mopars scored in these charts – their reputations for bad quality dogged them during this period, but the cars seem to have been better than their reputations. My 66 Fury III followed CU’s predictions and was one of the most trouble-free cars I ever owned as a daily driver.
The 1965 Ford seemed to up its game in comparison with the 60-64 cars, particularly in relation to arch-nemesis Chevrolet.
The classifications are interesting, how they went to items like “camshaft” and “piston rings” rather than more general categories. Cooling systems were absent here, making the 61-63 F-85 seem just as good as the 64-65, which was not our family’s experience.
I thought Mopar’s bad reputation had more to do with poor build quality on bodies than mechanics. The reviews I recall complained about misaligned doors and trim falling off, but praised the engines and transmissions. Though the early slant 6 seemed to have some problems.
I think there were a lot of folks who got burned in the late 50s. Reality can change but reputations can take awhile to catch up. Among the adults in my world in the 2nd half of the 60s, Chrysler products were not even considered by most of them, mostly because of their reputations for being trouble.
These results show that the corporation’s efforts to improve build quality and mechanical reliability in the wake of the 1957 fiasco were not just public relations puffery. The cars really did get much better. Subsequent entries in this series of articles, however, will show that the corporation’s quality began moving in the wrong direction around 1968.
Not surprised about the T-Bird rating as Ford dealerships did poor service work, from my experience back in the day. My parents had a new 1960 T-Bird conv., then a new 1963 Bird which I helped Dad select at age 12. When new only issue with the 1963 I remember is Mom felt a flaw on the backside of the steering wheel & Ford replaced the steering wheel. The 1963 was given to me on my 16th birthday early 1967 (parents recently bought a new 1966 Bird). The ’63’ got hit twice in a short time (once coming back from the body shop!), Ford dealer repairs were awful. Then Dad borrowed my ’63’, wrecked it, gave me the 1966 Bird early 1970. Dad borrowed that one, wrecked it mid 1970. Only problem with the 1966 was poor engineering of the power windows & as I remember it was in the shop four times to fix in four years. I now have a 1966 Bird conv., & the power windows still a pain even after I have replaced all the switches and motors.
Back in the day, my experience with Ford dealer service / repairs was so poor I never bought another Ford product after 1970 until I bought my restored 1966 Bird conv. about seven years ago. Yes, still hold my breath every time I raise or lower the power windows but I love my current ’66’ Bird conv.
Consumer Reports car ratings can make for some pretty emotional responses but when I was running a large repair shop, what I saw drive in was directly correlated to what I saw in CR.
In fact, I used to get the annual auto reliability ratings issue every year. I would order stock based on what I saw, for example bad carbs or alternators.
It was just like clockwork, too. We saw the cars just after they went out of warranty, so a three year lead-in.
^^^Now there’s some testimony from someone in the business (all makes)—-thanks for sharing this!
As a Ford guy I feel bad about the gadgety new Thunderbird, but can’t be too surprised. I wouldn’t have thought of the V8 up front of Mustang affecting not only steering/handling, but tires/alignment as well….
It’s interesting what CR has rated over the years, and how methods and ratings have changed, too. All of this so different from the automotive “buff books” relying on manufacturer-supplied cars, and then being dependent on advertising from same manufacturers….
I don’t doubt you. How closely did your experience really track with CR, though? Broadly, sure, I have no trouble believing it. But did you see more Slant-6 Darts than Slant-6 Valiants with camshaft troubles (or whatever other same-cars/different-ratings pairs at the time you’re talking about)?
Of course, it was broadly. For example, I gathered up as many THM 350 cores as I could when I found out about the THM 200. I first learned about that debacle from CR.
I used CR to accurately predict our doom in the auto repair business
Relatively speaking, we didn’t see all that many Valliants compared to GM and Ford stuff.
As I said above, CR auto ratings can evoke a lot of emotions.
My recollection, at least from the early 70s after the Rambler American went away, was that CR’s top recommendation for a one-car family (without too many children and no need for towing) was a Plymouth Valiant or Dodge Dart. I don’t recall their powertrain choice, but most likely the Slant Six and TorqueFlite.
Yep, that’s right; see the first highlighted block of text on this page from the August 1973 issue of CR (I highlighted the second block of text long ago to make a different point, and can’t seem to un-highlight it…not that I necessarily would!).
I don’t remember what year CR said something very close to “The sturdy Chrysler Corporation compacts, the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant, have long been our favorites”, but they said it. Probably sometime in the ’68-’72 timeframe.
In this August 1973 test they (again) had a legitimate beef with the Dart’s poorly-specified brakes: the front discs were great, but the rear drums locked up much too easily. It was not the first time CR complained about this, and they weren’t alone; this fault was raised in every test of an A-body with disc brakes. This was a staggeringly stupid bit of negligence by Chrysler, who could have eliminated this problem completely for $0.00 in R&D, $0.00 in parts tooling and procurement, and $0.00 per car by applying the fix they released in 1962 for police cars similarly prone to rear lockup: smaller-bore wheel cylinders in the rear brakes. Read about it directly from the horse’s mouth here and here. Swapping on the 13/16″ rear cylinders completely cured the rear lockup on every one of numerous A-bodies I owned, without introducing any new problems.
Get that: Chrysler knew how to fix the problem at no cost, and the parts were right there on the shelf, but despite Consumer Reports and everyone else justifiably squawking, Chrysler stared at the sky and said “Huh, looks like rain” and kept putting in the too-big 15/16″ rear wheel cylinders.
I have the 1964 Annual Auto Issue. The Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant had outscored the Rambler American by that point, and remained the top-rated compacts into the mid-1970s.
Don’t you mean the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant had outscored the Rambler American? (…and it’s me mocking CR’s longstanding custom of putting model names/numbers/designations in italics)
210delray
Posted January 23, 2022 at 7:35 PM
CR kept that up for a long time, don’t quite remember when they stopped (mid 70s)?
At least they didn’t use quotation marks!
Daniel Stern
Posted January 24, 2022 at 12:30 PM
I think they kept at it much longer than that. I want to say they were still doing it into the ’90s, and that they only dropped that weird little affectation relatively recently.
Here again, problems with CR’s methodology make themselves evident. Here are the 6-cylinder Dart/Lancer and Valiant charts. There is no vehicle-based reason why these reported differences would have actually existed.
Most likely not a large enough sample size to smooth out the inevitable slight differences between individual cars, owners, locales, driving conditions, and answer interpretations. They seem relatively close overall, if the range choice is no dot, gray dot and black dot from best to worst. It never seems to go from great to horrible, just one step past whatever boundary is in place.
A more technically oriented editor would/could likely have lumped both cars into the same column or at least counted all responses as the same batch and then used the aggregate result in both places.
Unless Plymouths were built on Mondays and Fridays and the Dodge badges came out in the middle of the week…
Overall I am guessing the sample size was probably adequate to determine at least a rough average frequency of the various complaints across an entire model year’s worth of all cars. There might easily have been sample size issues with particular make-models, which I think would likely have affected the accuracy of those make-models’ ratings, and also, depending on how the data were analysed, might have contaminated other cars’ ratings, too.
I think a big problem here is insufficient granularity of the three-category scale, which CR aggravated by attaching (I think spuriously) a highly meaningful word in the context of data analysis—”significant”—despite these results strongly suggesting, as you mention, that an editor rather than a statistician was deciding whether, when, and how to round up or down. I don’t claim to be a statistician, but these charts look to me like the result of reading into the data more meaning and significance than are actually present.
These are mechanically identical cars built of the same parts by the same people on the same production lines on the same days; there would not have been an actual, real, significant difference in the rate of (say) transmission problems or camshaft failures or piston ring issues or muffler faults between a ’63 Dart and a ’63 Valiant.
A thoughtful, appropriate response would have been to take a closer look at the data and the ranking scale to figure out what gave rise to these apparent differences. Could easily have been as simple as rigid boundaries between the categories with an overly simplistic count-’em-up method of assigning dots: overall, (say) 24 out of every 100 owners of 1963-model cars report carburetor issues, so for any 1963 model, we’ll say fewer than 20% reporting camshaft issues means significantly less than average, more than 30% means significantly more than average, and we’ll call between 21% and 29% average. So let their sample of ’63 Valiants present camshaft issues at 19.44% and their ’63 Dart sample present 20.56% camshaft issues, round to the nearest whole number, and the result is as printed: the Valiant has “significantly less” than the average rate of camshaft problems, while the Dart has the average rate of camshaft problems, despite there being, in this exercise, a probably-not-significant 1.12% actual difference in reported camshaft problems.
That’s about as close as I can make my guess, because—another problem—they just toss out that word significant without saying what they mean by it, and we have no way of knowing what the boundaries are between the categories. All we have is “Trust us, we’re impartial experts”.
There are other problems, too, such as self-selection bias.
Perhaps that’s part (or all) of the reason they expanded it to a five-dot scale a few years later? I don’t really read CR anymore (except if I’m at the library and have read everything else and see the latest issue on the rack…) but it’s generally useful for overall trends – i.e. the Toyota section tends to be mostly red (good) ink and the Land Rover section tends to be awash in black, so I suppose that validates the choice of a Land Cruiser over a Land Rover if wanting to go to the edge of the earth and, more importantly, return. Or just a 2012 Corolla over a 2012 neu-Dart or whatever…Camry over Accord? Eh, luck of the draw most likely.
Daniel Stern
Posted January 22, 2022 at 3:42 PM
I can tell it’s been awhile since you read CR…! They no longer use that red/white/black set of blobs (as they call them) you have in mind. They’ve changed to this scale, which is just a facelift of the same five-category ranking you remember. It is more granular than the 3-category system in these ’60s car ratings, but the fundamental problems still exist; they’re still opaque as to the actual, real differences between adjacent categories, still silent on what constitutes differences significant enough to put a product into one category or another, etc. And self-selection bias is still very much a thing.
I have great difficulty trusting CR’s ratings to any degree closer than broad strokes (Toyota as a sturdier bet than Land Rover, for example). I have decades-long, consistent experience opposite CR’s recommendations in products as diverse as cars, lawn mowers, washing machines, laundry detergents, and many more.
Now, I know—keenly—that the plural of anecdote is not data, and this cuts both ways: on the one hand, it means my counterexperience versus CR’s recommendations could be a remarkably long and consistent series of flukes, or could be a somewhat convoluted form of confirmation bias on my part. On the other hand, it also means CR’s “data” pool from a self-selected subset of CR subscribers could reasonably be called a large collection of anecdotes without much statistical worth, and since a statistical analysis is only as strong as its weakest element, well…that would mean the foundation is the weakest element, and that’s not so good.
Beyond that, I had a front-row seat for the development and initiation of what CR thinks of as their headlight tests. In 2003 they sent a representative, an associate editor, to a meeting of some of the most knowledgeable people in the field (the National Academy of Sciences Transportation Research Board Visibility Committee). We spent hours giving the CR rep what amounted to a course on night-driver vision, headlamp technology, the seeing/glare tradeoffs involved in formulating a low beam, etc.
Then CR went off and devised a “test” protocol that involves parking the car a certain distance away from dark-coloured targets spaced at intervals along a straight section of their Connecticut facility’s test track after dark, and the person in the driver’s seat makes a judgement call as to how many of the targets they think they can see. It is entirely subjective, which is a giant problem because what we feel like we’re seeing isn’t what we’re actually seeing. The human visual system is a lousy judge of how well it’s doing. I know what I can see seems reasonable, but it doesn’t square up with reality because we humans are just not well equipped to accurately evaluate how well or poorly we can see (or how well a headlamp works). Our subjective impressions tend to be very far out of line with objective, real measurements of how well we can (or can’t) see. And that’s without even addressing the issue of the difference between judgements made by the person who sat in cars last night versus the person who sat in cars the night before, etc.
Yet their headlamp ratings, like all their other findings and ratings and recommendations, are presented as unassailable objective truth.
(the cherry on top: they object like a broken record to sharp low-beam cutoffs even as they heavily favour low beams with maximum straight-ahead seeing distance. In fact this is a both-or-neither deal; if you want to put a bunch of light just below the horizon to maximise seeing distance, then you must necessarily have a sharp cutoff or else you produce so much glare that it’s not a low beam any more. We explained this in easy-to-understand detail to the CR rep in ’03, and he certainly seemed to understand it, but here we are.)
That’s a ’63 Valiant, but not a Plymouth Valiant. It’s a Canadian car: ’63 Valiant front end on ’63 Dart body, with some electrical and mechanical differences. Not a single Plymouth badge anywhere on it; Valiant was its own marque in Canada through ’66. They were sold at Dodge and Chry-Ply dealers alike.
My dad bought a 1961 Olds Dynamic 88 new and kept it to early 67. It was his first new car since his 48 Pontiac. Other than never being stranded by it I don’t know how reliable it was, as I was fairly young and the car was serviced at my dad’s work. One thing I do know is that there was significant rust by the end. There was a particular problem with the rear doors which both had large patches of rust. CR has a blank for rust for that year.
My Uncle Bob kept a new 61 Olds Dynamic 88 for exactly the same amount of time. It went away in 1967 after they noticed the transmission getting jerky in its shifting.
My aunt also bought an new ’61 Olds Dynamic 88. She kept it for 10 years until it failed PA inspection due to rust. I got to drive it in the later years after I got my license.
I don’t recall that she had any major problems with it. The transmission did get flummoxed when driving up a steep hill near us where a hard right turn onto level ground was needed. It would have trouble finding the correct gear and the engine would race momentarily at that location.
My uncle on the other hand bought a ’62 Pontiac Catalina as a used car. I remember the car being tied up for lengthy stints at the transmission shop.
When I was a member of the Oldsmobile Club of America, members would often recount their experiences with 1961-64 Oldsmobiles. They generally experienced the first signs of transmission trouble around 60,000 miles. The initial repair would be followed by complete transmission failure a few thousand miles later.
As for the door rust – perhaps the drain holes in the door became clogged? If water is trapped in the door, it will cause the door to rust out fairly quickly.
I don’t remember for sure even though I drove it back in the day, but I doubt my aunt’s ’61 Olds reached 60,000 miles, even after 10 years of ownership. After she got married in 1966, her husband’s ’63 Chevy Bel Air was used for vacation trips.
My mother had a ’55 Chevy followed by a ’61, and both of them accumulated only 30,000 miles after 6 years. She liked the ’55 better, probably should have held onto it longer!
People in general drove less in those days, so that is probably one reason why the Roto-Hydramatic didn’t do too much damage to the reputation of the big Oldsmobiles and Pontiac Catalina/Grand Prix. Quite a few first owners had probably traded by the time the transmission troubles reared their ugly head.
At home the car was parked outside or in an unheated garage, but during the day when my dad was at work it was parked in a heated garage. My dad thought that the melting of the slush on the car was what did in the doors. He worked for the TTC which ran the public transit in Toronto and at that time they were evaluating some rustproofing products, so I am sure he was very aware of rusting in vehicles. His next (and last) car, a 68 Cougar had Ziebart rustproofing applied, but we did not keep it long enough to know if it worked.
My parents had a 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air wagon that was bought used. Based on their experience, the reliability of those 1965 Chevrolets didn’t improve as they aged. GM cut a few corners on those cars.
Surprised that the ratings of the 1961-63 Oldsmobile F-85 and Buick Special don’t show problems with the aluminum V-8. Those V-8s were supposedly plagued with problems that should have manifested themselves by the time this survey was conducted.
Thanks for sharing these, Stephen. It looks like my fleet average is about average; fortunately, my T-Bird is a ’63, so they worked some of the bugs out. The ’65 Dart is the high scorer for me – way to go Dirty Dart!
Amazing how many cars that were just one model year old were having rust problems already. And it is not just a Ford problem either – pretty much every manufacturer was making their share of rust buckets.
Chevys sure seemed like rattletraps. And why would rust issues be worse for the 6 than the V8? Maybe more 6s were being sold in the snow belt?
Big Chevy owners reported way more rattles than Pontiacs which had the same basic body. Probably had to do with the willowy (and less safe) X frame dating back to 1958. Not sure when it went away.
I noticed a lot of muffler problems. Well, they were mostly plain steel, not aluminized or galvanized or anything else. And water is a product of combustion. Short trips equaled short muffler life. And car warrantees were way shorter.
CR car reports are now much less specific about where the problems are.
Also, leaded gasoline exhaust is much more aggressively corrosive than unleaded, and there was a lot more sulphur in the gasoline back then, too, which makes sulphuric acid in the exhaust.
My father, who was real car guy, used to plan on replacing the muffler every 2 years. That was in Toronto in the 60s, so lots of salt. He expected 4 years from the rest of the exhaust, but only 2 years from the battery.
I’m amazed at the comparative reliability of the Mopars given their reputation. At various times I owned a few cars of of that era. Those cars included a ’60 Valiant, ’62 Olds 98, ’62 Buick Electra 225, ’62 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, ’64 Ford Galaxy 500, & ’64 Chrysler New Yorker. Since they were all well used by the time I got them, they were presumably some of the better survivors. I remember all of them as being pretty reliable despite their age and mileage. The Cadillac sticks out as having an electrical short that would drain the battery. Fixed by wiring in a cutout switch to the accessory electrical circuit. The Chrysler was the oldest one when I owned it back in 1981-82. Appearance wise, it was a real beater, but you couldn’t fault the powertrain. The Olds had a flaky transmission, but it never failed. The Valiant was a great running car but a real rust bucket. The Ford had a 352. Sold that one to a friend when we both graduated college. He promptly moved to Arizona to accept his first job at a Kingman newspaper. Despite using a lot of gas to produce relatively modest acceleration, the Ford was a good reliable car. The Buick was an outlier. I bought it from my boss who thought the engine had a cracked block. It didn’t and I fixed it by replacing the head gasket. It was a very well cared for car and I had no problems with it right up until the engine threw a rod. Then it really did have a cracked block. It was the only one of the cars I ended up junking. All the others lived on with subsequent owners. Even the Chrysler was sellable. I was thinking it was in such bad shape I’d never find a buyer, but my boss at the time bought it for his son who was turning 16. Given the stout mechanicals and lack of any dent free body panels, it probably wasn’t a bad choice as a 1st ride for a new teenage driver.
The infamous Roto-Hydramatic shows up as lots of black dots in ’61-’64 big Olds and F-85 and Big Pontiacs.
Yes, the reputation of the Valiant and Dodge Dart sixes was not a fluke.
Thanks for this; a good look back.
CR did not like the Roto-Hydramatic even when it was new in ’61. They recommended to anyone who wanted to buy a ’61 Pontiac to select a Star Chief or Bonneville (and not the Catalina), because those models still had the old 4-speed Hydramatic.
My opinion: the 4-speed Hydramatic was at its best in 58, 59, & 60.
With so many reliability problems, I can understand why folks resto-mod these cars.
The idea that camshafts, valves, and piston rings have high and low reliability in the first few years of ownership must mean something. Basic engineering, assembly quality, materials quality, or “all of the above”? All at a level so far below the common expectations of today…
I can’t imagine that those categories still exist, or, if they do, that likely almost all of the readership would not even know what they are and what they do.
Earlier state of every involved art, including product durability/dependability testing. And the severely lousy engine oil and dirty-burning gasoline available at the time made an unhappy marriage with maintenance practices that could run from slack to harebrained.
I forgot all about the movie ratings, which IIRC continued well into the ’70s, along with a blurb like “CR makes no judgment about films; we’re just reporting how subscribers rated them” or some such; don’t remember movie critics’ opinions being mixed in.
This issue went to press just around when Studebaker announced they were ending car production, not sure if it was before or after. CR did include a 1964 Lark sedan in a comparison test of American small cars that year, and they noted they bought the car before the South Bend closure announcement was made. The car did passibly well in their tests but not enough to recommend buying one under the circumstances. I think that was their last acknowledgement of Studebakers.
Weirdest thing here is how most 65-66 Dodge Dart V8s are lemons, while Plymouth Valiants with the same engine are superbly reliable.
(Taking a second look at the Dart V8 chart not sure if those are grey dots or black dots – the contrast between them on some charts isn’t good on my screent).
The 64-65 Dodge Dart V-8 dots are shaded “averages”, not the solid black dots. It’s a little hard to tell the difference in the computer scanned images. The 64-65 Plymouth Valiant V-8s have a similar record.
CR published movie surveys all the way up until 1997 or so! I guess at that point, Internet review sites made the magazine feature obsolete.
We watched That Darn Cat last night. It has held up reasonably well, considering that it was aimed at children as much as adults.
“Hence the unflattering acronyms for F O R D which we all know and I won’t repeat here.”
Like “First On Race Day?” Hardly unflattering.
Perhaps you’re referring to “Flip Over, Read Directions.”
Got plenty of those. Queuing for the toilets at the Bathurst 1000 while comfortably buzzed gets the mind working. Fast Only Rolling Down Hill.
more like FU**ED on race day, Found On Road Dead, Fix Or Repair Daily
C’mon, what is this, amateur hour? If this quarrel is worth having, it’s worth having right: One team line up along one side of the road and holler FoMoCo!, and the other team line up facing them on the other side of the road and holler back FoNoGo!. Back and forth and back and forth until the winner is determined, or the streetlights come on and everyone has to get home or else get in trouble with mom and dad. Whichever comes first.
I wonder if CR considered the statistical imbalance of their method. CR subscribers were CAREFUL buyers who read the articles, bought the low-dot cars, and drove them CAREFULLY. So the high-dot cars were naturally unrepresented unless they were surprises. If Ford sixes had been reliable for several years, then suddenly turned bad this year, they would show up in CR.
It is interesting how well Mopars scored in these charts – their reputations for bad quality dogged them during this period, but the cars seem to have been better than their reputations. My 66 Fury III followed CU’s predictions and was one of the most trouble-free cars I ever owned as a daily driver.
The 1965 Ford seemed to up its game in comparison with the 60-64 cars, particularly in relation to arch-nemesis Chevrolet.
The classifications are interesting, how they went to items like “camshaft” and “piston rings” rather than more general categories. Cooling systems were absent here, making the 61-63 F-85 seem just as good as the 64-65, which was not our family’s experience.
I thought Mopar’s bad reputation had more to do with poor build quality on bodies than mechanics. The reviews I recall complained about misaligned doors and trim falling off, but praised the engines and transmissions. Though the early slant 6 seemed to have some problems.
I think there were a lot of folks who got burned in the late 50s. Reality can change but reputations can take awhile to catch up. Among the adults in my world in the 2nd half of the 60s, Chrysler products were not even considered by most of them, mostly because of their reputations for being trouble.
These results show that the corporation’s efforts to improve build quality and mechanical reliability in the wake of the 1957 fiasco were not just public relations puffery. The cars really did get much better. Subsequent entries in this series of articles, however, will show that the corporation’s quality began moving in the wrong direction around 1968.
Not surprised about the T-Bird rating as Ford dealerships did poor service work, from my experience back in the day. My parents had a new 1960 T-Bird conv., then a new 1963 Bird which I helped Dad select at age 12. When new only issue with the 1963 I remember is Mom felt a flaw on the backside of the steering wheel & Ford replaced the steering wheel. The 1963 was given to me on my 16th birthday early 1967 (parents recently bought a new 1966 Bird). The ’63’ got hit twice in a short time (once coming back from the body shop!), Ford dealer repairs were awful. Then Dad borrowed my ’63’, wrecked it, gave me the 1966 Bird early 1970. Dad borrowed that one, wrecked it mid 1970. Only problem with the 1966 was poor engineering of the power windows & as I remember it was in the shop four times to fix in four years. I now have a 1966 Bird conv., & the power windows still a pain even after I have replaced all the switches and motors.
Back in the day, my experience with Ford dealer service / repairs was so poor I never bought another Ford product after 1970 until I bought my restored 1966 Bird conv. about seven years ago. Yes, still hold my breath every time I raise or lower the power windows but I love my current ’66’ Bird conv.
Consumer Reports car ratings can make for some pretty emotional responses but when I was running a large repair shop, what I saw drive in was directly correlated to what I saw in CR.
In fact, I used to get the annual auto reliability ratings issue every year. I would order stock based on what I saw, for example bad carbs or alternators.
It was just like clockwork, too. We saw the cars just after they went out of warranty, so a three year lead-in.
^^^Now there’s some testimony from someone in the business (all makes)—-thanks for sharing this!
As a Ford guy I feel bad about the gadgety new Thunderbird, but can’t be too surprised. I wouldn’t have thought of the V8 up front of Mustang affecting not only steering/handling, but tires/alignment as well….
It’s interesting what CR has rated over the years, and how methods and ratings have changed, too. All of this so different from the automotive “buff books” relying on manufacturer-supplied cars, and then being dependent on advertising from same manufacturers….
I don’t doubt you. How closely did your experience really track with CR, though? Broadly, sure, I have no trouble believing it. But did you see more Slant-6 Darts than Slant-6 Valiants with camshaft troubles (or whatever other same-cars/different-ratings pairs at the time you’re talking about)?
Of course, it was broadly. For example, I gathered up as many THM 350 cores as I could when I found out about the THM 200. I first learned about that debacle from CR.
I used CR to accurately predict our doom in the auto repair business
Relatively speaking, we didn’t see all that many Valliants compared to GM and Ford stuff.
As I said above, CR auto ratings can evoke a lot of emotions.
CR’s preferred car, for years, was the Rambler American.
Might explain why I valued “Car & Driver” for their automotive road tests than CR?
My recollection, at least from the early 70s after the Rambler American went away, was that CR’s top recommendation for a one-car family (without too many children and no need for towing) was a Plymouth Valiant or Dodge Dart. I don’t recall their powertrain choice, but most likely the Slant Six and TorqueFlite.
Yep, that’s right; see the first highlighted block of text on this page from the August 1973 issue of CR (I highlighted the second block of text long ago to make a different point, and can’t seem to un-highlight it…not that I necessarily would!).
I don’t remember what year CR said something very close to “The sturdy Chrysler Corporation compacts, the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant, have long been our favorites”, but they said it. Probably sometime in the ’68-’72 timeframe.
In this August 1973 test they (again) had a legitimate beef with the Dart’s poorly-specified brakes: the front discs were great, but the rear drums locked up much too easily. It was not the first time CR complained about this, and they weren’t alone; this fault was raised in every test of an A-body with disc brakes. This was a staggeringly stupid bit of negligence by Chrysler, who could have eliminated this problem completely for $0.00 in R&D, $0.00 in parts tooling and procurement, and $0.00 per car by applying the fix they released in 1962 for police cars similarly prone to rear lockup: smaller-bore wheel cylinders in the rear brakes. Read about it directly from the horse’s mouth here and here. Swapping on the 13/16″ rear cylinders completely cured the rear lockup on every one of numerous A-bodies I owned, without introducing any new problems.
Get that: Chrysler knew how to fix the problem at no cost, and the parts were right there on the shelf, but despite Consumer Reports and everyone else justifiably squawking, Chrysler stared at the sky and said “Huh, looks like rain” and kept putting in the too-big 15/16″ rear wheel cylinders.
I have the 1964 Annual Auto Issue. The Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant had outscored the Rambler American by that point, and remained the top-rated compacts into the mid-1970s.
Don’t you mean the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant had outscored the Rambler American? (…and it’s me mocking CR’s longstanding custom of putting model names/numbers/designations in italics)
CR kept that up for a long time, don’t quite remember when they stopped (mid 70s)?
At least they didn’t use quotation marks!
I think they kept at it much longer than that. I want to say they were still doing it into the ’90s, and that they only dropped that weird little affectation relatively recently.
From all reports, the ’67 Toronado should never have been released with 4-wheel drum brakes. Just another GM example of death by beancounters.
Here again, problems with CR’s methodology make themselves evident. Here are the 6-cylinder Dart/Lancer and Valiant charts. There is no vehicle-based reason why these reported differences would have actually existed.
Most likely not a large enough sample size to smooth out the inevitable slight differences between individual cars, owners, locales, driving conditions, and answer interpretations. They seem relatively close overall, if the range choice is no dot, gray dot and black dot from best to worst. It never seems to go from great to horrible, just one step past whatever boundary is in place.
A more technically oriented editor would/could likely have lumped both cars into the same column or at least counted all responses as the same batch and then used the aggregate result in both places.
Unless Plymouths were built on Mondays and Fridays and the Dodge badges came out in the middle of the week…
Overall I am guessing the sample size was probably adequate to determine at least a rough average frequency of the various complaints across an entire model year’s worth of all cars. There might easily have been sample size issues with particular make-models, which I think would likely have affected the accuracy of those make-models’ ratings, and also, depending on how the data were analysed, might have contaminated other cars’ ratings, too.
I think a big problem here is insufficient granularity of the three-category scale, which CR aggravated by attaching (I think spuriously) a highly meaningful word in the context of data analysis—”significant”—despite these results strongly suggesting, as you mention, that an editor rather than a statistician was deciding whether, when, and how to round up or down. I don’t claim to be a statistician, but these charts look to me like the result of reading into the data more meaning and significance than are actually present.
These are mechanically identical cars built of the same parts by the same people on the same production lines on the same days; there would not have been an actual, real, significant difference in the rate of (say) transmission problems or camshaft failures or piston ring issues or muffler faults between a ’63 Dart and a ’63 Valiant.
A thoughtful, appropriate response would have been to take a closer look at the data and the ranking scale to figure out what gave rise to these apparent differences. Could easily have been as simple as rigid boundaries between the categories with an overly simplistic count-’em-up method of assigning dots: overall, (say) 24 out of every 100 owners of 1963-model cars report carburetor issues, so for any 1963 model, we’ll say fewer than 20% reporting camshaft issues means significantly less than average, more than 30% means significantly more than average, and we’ll call between 21% and 29% average. So let their sample of ’63 Valiants present camshaft issues at 19.44% and their ’63 Dart sample present 20.56% camshaft issues, round to the nearest whole number, and the result is as printed: the Valiant has “significantly less” than the average rate of camshaft problems, while the Dart has the average rate of camshaft problems, despite there being, in this exercise, a probably-not-significant 1.12% actual difference in reported camshaft problems.
That’s about as close as I can make my guess, because—another problem—they just toss out that word significant without saying what they mean by it, and we have no way of knowing what the boundaries are between the categories. All we have is “Trust us, we’re impartial experts”.
There are other problems, too, such as self-selection bias.
Perhaps that’s part (or all) of the reason they expanded it to a five-dot scale a few years later? I don’t really read CR anymore (except if I’m at the library and have read everything else and see the latest issue on the rack…) but it’s generally useful for overall trends – i.e. the Toyota section tends to be mostly red (good) ink and the Land Rover section tends to be awash in black, so I suppose that validates the choice of a Land Cruiser over a Land Rover if wanting to go to the edge of the earth and, more importantly, return. Or just a 2012 Corolla over a 2012 neu-Dart or whatever…Camry over Accord? Eh, luck of the draw most likely.
I can tell it’s been awhile since you read CR…! They no longer use that red/white/black set of blobs (as they call them) you have in mind. They’ve changed to this scale, which is just a facelift of the same five-category ranking you remember. It is more granular than the 3-category system in these ’60s car ratings, but the fundamental problems still exist; they’re still opaque as to the actual, real differences between adjacent categories, still silent on what constitutes differences significant enough to put a product into one category or another, etc. And self-selection bias is still very much a thing.
I have great difficulty trusting CR’s ratings to any degree closer than broad strokes (Toyota as a sturdier bet than Land Rover, for example). I have decades-long, consistent experience opposite CR’s recommendations in products as diverse as cars, lawn mowers, washing machines, laundry detergents, and many more.
Now, I know—keenly—that the plural of anecdote is not data, and this cuts both ways: on the one hand, it means my counterexperience versus CR’s recommendations could be a remarkably long and consistent series of flukes, or could be a somewhat convoluted form of confirmation bias on my part. On the other hand, it also means CR’s “data” pool from a self-selected subset of CR subscribers could reasonably be called a large collection of anecdotes without much statistical worth, and since a statistical analysis is only as strong as its weakest element, well…that would mean the foundation is the weakest element, and that’s not so good.
Beyond that, I had a front-row seat for the development and initiation of what CR thinks of as their headlight tests. In 2003 they sent a representative, an associate editor, to a meeting of some of the most knowledgeable people in the field (the National Academy of Sciences Transportation Research Board Visibility Committee). We spent hours giving the CR rep what amounted to a course on night-driver vision, headlamp technology, the seeing/glare tradeoffs involved in formulating a low beam, etc.
Then CR went off and devised a “test” protocol that involves parking the car a certain distance away from dark-coloured targets spaced at intervals along a straight section of their Connecticut facility’s test track after dark, and the person in the driver’s seat makes a judgement call as to how many of the targets they think they can see. It is entirely subjective, which is a giant problem because what we feel like we’re seeing isn’t what we’re actually seeing. The human visual system is a lousy judge of how well it’s doing. I know what I can see seems reasonable, but it doesn’t square up with reality because we humans are just not well equipped to accurately evaluate how well or poorly we can see (or how well a headlamp works). Our subjective impressions tend to be very far out of line with objective, real measurements of how well we can (or can’t) see. And that’s without even addressing the issue of the difference between judgements made by the person who sat in cars last night versus the person who sat in cars the night before, etc.
Yet their headlamp ratings, like all their other findings and ratings and recommendations, are presented as unassailable objective truth.
(the cherry on top: they object like a broken record to sharp low-beam cutoffs even as they heavily favour low beams with maximum straight-ahead seeing distance. In fact this is a both-or-neither deal; if you want to put a bunch of light just below the horizon to maximise seeing distance, then you must necessarily have a sharp cutoff or else you produce so much glare that it’s not a low beam any more. We explained this in easy-to-understand detail to the CR rep in ’03, and he certainly seemed to understand it, but here we are.)
That’s a ’63 Valiant, but not a Plymouth Valiant. It’s a Canadian car: ’63 Valiant front end on ’63 Dart body, with some electrical and mechanical differences. Not a single Plymouth badge anywhere on it; Valiant was its own marque in Canada through ’66. They were sold at Dodge and Chry-Ply dealers alike.
…and record albums, too!
The Toronado problems, brakes plus:
…the other for the tricky behavior that shows up when you have to slow down from accelerating around a curve.
Trailing throttle oversteer? I’ve never driven one but it makes sense.
I had no idea CR was the proto-rotten tomatoes with a combined critic and audience score!
Bummer no foreign brands. I wanted to see how rhe brittish cars of the era compares to american brands.
My dad bought a 1961 Olds Dynamic 88 new and kept it to early 67. It was his first new car since his 48 Pontiac. Other than never being stranded by it I don’t know how reliable it was, as I was fairly young and the car was serviced at my dad’s work. One thing I do know is that there was significant rust by the end. There was a particular problem with the rear doors which both had large patches of rust. CR has a blank for rust for that year.
My Uncle Bob kept a new 61 Olds Dynamic 88 for exactly the same amount of time. It went away in 1967 after they noticed the transmission getting jerky in its shifting.
My aunt also bought an new ’61 Olds Dynamic 88. She kept it for 10 years until it failed PA inspection due to rust. I got to drive it in the later years after I got my license.
I don’t recall that she had any major problems with it. The transmission did get flummoxed when driving up a steep hill near us where a hard right turn onto level ground was needed. It would have trouble finding the correct gear and the engine would race momentarily at that location.
My uncle on the other hand bought a ’62 Pontiac Catalina as a used car. I remember the car being tied up for lengthy stints at the transmission shop.
When I was a member of the Oldsmobile Club of America, members would often recount their experiences with 1961-64 Oldsmobiles. They generally experienced the first signs of transmission trouble around 60,000 miles. The initial repair would be followed by complete transmission failure a few thousand miles later.
As for the door rust – perhaps the drain holes in the door became clogged? If water is trapped in the door, it will cause the door to rust out fairly quickly.
I don’t remember for sure even though I drove it back in the day, but I doubt my aunt’s ’61 Olds reached 60,000 miles, even after 10 years of ownership. After she got married in 1966, her husband’s ’63 Chevy Bel Air was used for vacation trips.
My mother had a ’55 Chevy followed by a ’61, and both of them accumulated only 30,000 miles after 6 years. She liked the ’55 better, probably should have held onto it longer!
People in general drove less in those days, so that is probably one reason why the Roto-Hydramatic didn’t do too much damage to the reputation of the big Oldsmobiles and Pontiac Catalina/Grand Prix. Quite a few first owners had probably traded by the time the transmission troubles reared their ugly head.
At home the car was parked outside or in an unheated garage, but during the day when my dad was at work it was parked in a heated garage. My dad thought that the melting of the slush on the car was what did in the doors. He worked for the TTC which ran the public transit in Toronto and at that time they were evaluating some rustproofing products, so I am sure he was very aware of rusting in vehicles. His next (and last) car, a 68 Cougar had Ziebart rustproofing applied, but we did not keep it long enough to know if it worked.
My parents had a 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air wagon that was bought used. Based on their experience, the reliability of those 1965 Chevrolets didn’t improve as they aged. GM cut a few corners on those cars.
Surprised that the ratings of the 1961-63 Oldsmobile F-85 and Buick Special don’t show problems with the aluminum V-8. Those V-8s were supposedly plagued with problems that should have manifested themselves by the time this survey was conducted.
We had a 1962 Buick Special with the 215V8 and it was as reliable as any iron V8 in the 12 years we owned it.