pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/carbuying/" rel="tag"Car Buying/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/trends/" rel="tag"Trends/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/etc/" rel="tag"Etc./a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/ford/" rel="tag"Ford/a/pimg vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2009/04/10taurus_62_580.jpg" alt="" /br /br /Most auto pundits will tell you that Ford has made great strides in quality over the last few years. Ford's own studies, performed for the automaker by third party RDA Group, show that the efforts continue to pay off, with Ford pulling even with Toyota in initial quality and breezing by Honda. It's a little bit like a cigarette company funding studies on smoking safety, but the results aren't far-fetched. br /br /The five cars that Ford touts as segment leaders in initial quality - Mustang, Taurus, Taurus X, Milan, and Ranger - have been praised in the open waters of the media, though the Ranger has been left behind as its competitors have upsized, and the Taurus X is not long for this world. br /br /For the first quarter of 2009, problems-per-vehicle have dropped by 5% to 1,228 per 1,000 vehicles, meaning that there's a good number of Ford vehicles that show no initial quality defects whatsoever. Toyota's 1,150 per 1,000 rate of things gone wrong is considered equal to the performance of the Ford models, and Honda's not too far behind at 1,422, despite Ford saying its showing is "significantly better" than Honda's. Initial quality is only part of the deal, of course, with long-term quality scores telling more of the story. Of course, initial quality helps too, and besides, it's easier to ace the long-term test when you start off with a bang. Press release after the break.br /br /[Source: Ford]pa href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/04/17/ford-initial-quality-beats-honda-ties-toyota-according-to-fo/" rel="bookmark"Continue reading emFord initial quality beats Honda, ties Toyota... according to Ford/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/04/17/ford-initial-quality-beats-honda-ties-toyota-according-to-fo/"Ford initial quality beats Honda, ties Toyota... according to Ford/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:33:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/04/17/ford-initial-quality-beats-honda-ties-toyota-according-to-fo/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1520290/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/04/17/ford-initial-quality-beats-honda-ties-toyota-according-to-fo/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ATQk-cW2URL2VQcRqNf23NoHZ8s/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ATQk-cW2URL2VQcRqNf23NoHZ8s/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=bqanXu0x-XM:ZlZoNUJKyuU:wF9xT3WuBAs"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=bqanXu0x-XM:ZlZoNUJKyuU:wF9xT3WuBAs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=bqanXu0x-XM:ZlZoNUJKyuU:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=bqanXu0x-XM:ZlZoNUJKyuU:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/bqanXu0x-XM" height="1" width="1"/

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