Toyota tops customer satisfaction study

The leading market research company, J.D. Power and Associates gave Toyota the highest score in the 2003 Germany Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI), with the leadership if five of seven vehicle segments.

The CSI Index is now in its second year and, for 2003, 16,808 vehicle owners have rated their vehicles, their dealers and the cost of ownership after two years.

This survey is based on four areas with different weights: Quality and reliability (30 per cent), vehicle appeal (25 per cent), service satisfaction (23 per cent) and ownership costs (22 per cent).

Overall, Toyota is the clear favourite among German car owners by a large margin, scoring 841 points out of a possible 1,000 - 31 points ahead of the second place. As a reference, the industry average is 781 points.

This impressive score is again repeated in the classifications per segment. In the small car segment, Yaris is the highest ranked, while in the lower medium and upper medium segments, Toyota Corolla and Toyota Avensis are the top models, respectively.

Europe's best selling SUV, the Toyota RAV 4, achieves the top position among SUVs and the Toyota Celica achieves a top position (in the sports segment) by the highest margin (46 points).

Earlier this year, Toyota had already achieved a very strong performance in other key customer satisfaction and reliability surveys in Germany: ADAC and TÜV.

In the TÜV auto-Report 2003, Yaris (in the 1-3 year category) achieved the lowest breakdown rate of the whole survey, as in the ADAC study where Avensis garnered the highest score overall and Corolla qualified as the best model in the segment.

J.D. Power and Associates is a leading market research organisation which conducts several quality and customer satisfaction studies in the world's main automotive markets, based on responses from millions of consumers annually.