Comment by jabl

That's very interesting. I could argue that you are reading the signal wrong here. You want to go for the car that has the most failures in some cases, since it has survived long enough to fail in minor ways that leave it still able to drive.

If you have car brand A that has a reputation for having catastrophically expensive failures in major components, and car brand B which just keep chugging along for decades, you will probably see an elevated failure rate for brand B since it is still driving, while brand A will not be failing since it has already failed so badly it has been scrapped.

Those sorts of comparisons are highly misleading because the overwhelming majority of failures for any inspection program are simple stuff that doesn't affect the operation of the vehicle in the base case. Light out, bald tires, brakes below replacement threshold, windshield crack, minor exhaust leak, etc. So what you wind up measuring by proxy is the owner behavior, since that's the dominant factor in how proactively those sorts of things get addressed.

And it ought to surprise nobody that trophy wives in 4runners show up with their vehicle in a statistically different state of repair than single moms in Altimas.

The big failures that you really want to avoid almost never show up on safety inspection data because they typically render the car much less drivable so they either get fixed promptly or the car stops coming around for it's inspection.