It’s no secret that interest in EVs is growing amongst consumers, but are they performing as designed? Earlier this week, JD Power published its Initial Quality Study for 2022 model-year cars, which revealed that new vehicle quality has declined 11 per cent year over year, which is the steepest drop ever recorded by the company.
To compile the report, the survey collected input from 84,165 verified owners and lessees of personal use vehicles registered between November 2021 through February. Armed with this information, JD Power assigned each automaker an issue count per 100 vehicles. According to the report, EV manufacturers are struggling with quality control, as popular EV brands like Tesla find themselves near the bottom of the list.
In this year’s survey, JD Power recorded 226 problems per 100 Tesla vehicles. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, as Tesla has faced no shortage of recall issues and, in 2020, JD Power scored Tesla vehicles the worst among 32 major brands in its annual quality study. If we leave Tesla out of the equation, the report found 240 problems per 100 EVs from other manufacturers. Last year, this number sat at 251 per 100 vehicles so, at least, this represents a marginal improvement.
According to the report, six of the top 10 issues related to infotainment, such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. In addition to the reported drop in quality, JD Power noted that many automakers cut back on the availability of certain consumer-lowed features, like driver-assist and heated seats, to account for the current chip shortage.
“Automakers continue to launch vehicles that are more and more technologically complex in an era in which there have been many shortages of critical components to support them,” JD Power’s director of global automotive, David Amodeo, said in a press release to acknowledge the challenges current faced by automakers.
