Will Cars Built During COVID End Up Being Problematic Down The Road?

I recently took ownership of a 2021 BMW i3S built in June of 2021, just as COVID lockdowns and madness started to taper off. The effects of the lockdown on manufacturing were profound: Limitations were placed on who could work and when, supply chains were severely constrained, and turnover in the workforce was tremendous. How, then, will these COVID-built cars fare long-term?

It was four years ago when COVID really began kicking the U.S.’s butt, and pretty much everything shut down. People were told not to come into work, though some had no choice — among those some were factory workers, who had to put cars together. The problem was: Sometimes the parts needed to complete a car weren’t available. Factories in different nations had to abide by whatever their countries’ rules were, so if you needed an engine from Mexico, for example, and Mexico had to shut that plant down for safety reasons, you were pretty well screwed.

Dealing with the various COVID restrictions around the world put huge limitations on manufacturing to the point where some car companies were building cars without certain features because they just didn’t have the parts. The chip shortage at around the same time caused huge issues, with automakers building incomplete cars, only to keep them in holding yards until parts were available to complete them.

In the case of the BMW i3, the company was unable to offer the Harman Kardon stereo system during COVID because the parts just weren’t available. Luckily, my car has that option somehow, but it also has some build quality issues that my 2014 just doesn’t:

 

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Can these build quality issues be attributed to COVID? It’s a question that lots of folks are asking (see below), though I don’t really have an answer; my car’s quality issues could also just be seven year-old tooling getting long in the tooth or regular Technical Cost Reduction leading to worse fitment. In any case, it seems almost certain that at least some COVID built cars will end up having issues that non-COVID cars don’t; automakers were clamoring to build as many vehicles as they could as demand spiked after a long lull.

With folks “finding themselves” and switching careers to lead inexperienced replacements to have to handle difficult manufacturing jobs, parts hard to obtain, and demand vastly outweighing supply, you’d think that some corners would have to be cut. But the data on that front isn’t yet clear. We’ve seen huge recalls/warranty costs at Ford lately, but does that have to do with COVID? I don’t know.

I reached out to Consumer Reports, whose Sr. Communications Specialist James McQueen told me there’s no clear data pointing to “COVID Cars” being a thing. “The short answer is no,” he emailed me. “Our data doesn’t reflect any noticeable change in car reliability/problem rates in 2020 or 2021. From what we can tell, it has remained fairly consistent.”

Hmm.

Meanwhile, back in the summer of 2022, JD Power released the results of its Initial Quality Study, and it concluded something different:

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, initial vehicle quality notably declined, according to the J.D. Power 2022 U.S. Initial Quality Study^SM (IQS), released today. The disruptions caused by the pandemic—supply chain issues, record-high vehicle prices and personnel dislocations—contributed to vehicle problems reaching a record high in the 36-year history of this benchmark study. Compared with 2021 results, the industry experienced an 11% increase in problems per 100 vehicles (PP100), which is 18 PP100 worse than last year, resulting in an industry average of 180 PP100. A lower score reflects higher vehicle quality.

Hot damn! A record high in the 36-year history of the study! More from JD Power:

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, initial vehicle quality notably declined, according to the J.D. Power 2022 U.S. Initial Quality Study^SM (IQS), released today. The disruptions caused by the pandemic—supply chain issues, record-high vehicle prices and personnel dislocations—contributed to vehicle problems reaching a record high in the 36-year history of this benchmark study. Compared with 2021 results, the industry experienced an 11% increase in problems per 100 vehicles (PP100), which is 18 PP100 worse than last year, resulting in an industry average of 180 PP100. A lower score reflects higher vehicle quality.

Many of the issues (six of the top 10) were related to infotainment, which isn’t surprising, as results of JD Power studies are often dragged down by infotainment. What about powertrain reliability, though? The important stuff that actually affects how a car drives? How much did those change during the pandemic?

Some of this stuff we’re just not going to know until we “wait and see,” but logical thinking leads me to think: COVID cars are a compromise. They had to be in order to get off the assembly line. For those compromises to in no way affect longevity would be putting a lot of faith into an automaker’s (and all of its suppliers) quality control regimen during a pandemic that brought uncertainty to all. I’m not sure that passes my laugh-test.

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