A lot of good points brought up here, too many to repeat as quotes.
There definitely is a difference between folks who trade in for a new vehicle every 1 - 5 years, versus folks who buy and hold for 10 - 20 years. I'm in the latter camp, where any problem that anyone reports on a given vehicle of interest, could potentially become my problem to have to pay for at some point, without benefit of a warranty, if I chose to buy that vehicle.
So when I see a vehicle fixed under warranty, I check to see if the fix involves a change of parts design, that addresses the root cause of the problem, or if the fix is simply another re-installation of the same failure prone system, repeated until the warranty times out. If newly designed parts are involved, that provides some hope for me being able to afford that vehicle, because at some point I will be shouldering all the cost to keep that vehicle running.
When I see a manufacturer accuse the customer, blame the customer, deny the customer warranty coverage where due, and repeatedly get away with it... my hopes for the root cause of the problem ever being fixed with an improved design diminish for that specific year/model/make of vehicle, because the manufacturer is not incentivized to incur the costs to re-engineer a retrofitable solution, when the more profitable solution is to simply keep building them the same way and use the same excuse to deny coverage. I can't afford that, either while within or outside of warranty.
Many of the regular names on this thread have read, contemporaneously, in real time as it was happening, on various forums, the stories about Ford denying coverage for CP4 pump failures. We are all smart enough to recognize the difference between a customer who inadvertantly put DEF in their fuel tank, versus a customer whose fuel system failed through no fault of their own.
No reasonable person would expect Ford to pay for fuel system failures due to DEF being put into the tank, so to try and lump that category of failure in the same bucket as the pure C4 failures... is simply a brand biased defense that doesn't hold water, so to speak. We already understand the difference.
We also get the difference between how GM handled CP4 failures, versus how Ford handled them, because again, we were here, reading the reports contemporaneously as they were happening in real time. Yes, they were anecdotal, not statistical. But you know, where there is smoke, there is usually a fire, and the take away of too many people here is plainly too consistent to ignore.
We also understand that many folks are personally incentivized to vigorously defend the resale value of the year/brand/model of vehicle that they currently own, so when it comes time for them to sell or trade out of it, the negative points about their vehicle found in online chatter are dampened with counterpoints to invalidate those claims and uphold the perceived value. We see through that too.
On a different note, but related to a tangent of this thread, does anyone know if the blind spot mirror to the new 2020 Ram HD is electrically adjustable? I saw a diagram with two red arrows referring to each segment of the 2020 Ram towing mirror that seemed to imply a new feature... suggesting by illustration that both sections of mirror were adjustable by remote control. If that were the case, then that would make the Ram's antlers more useful in the down position, would it not? Again, this is a question, not a statement. I can no longer find the marketing illustration that had those red arrows by each segment of mirror, but I'm sure one of the Ram experts here can find it.
