Quality street
What’s perceived quality, then? Am I the only one getting a bit fed up with reading this term, which is used in countless reports? Please can you tell us if quality is present or not? I don’t want to know if the manufacturer is simply trying to trick me into thinking it’s ‘quality’ when it’s like a cheap sofa, one that looks good on the outside but will have fallen to bits long before you’ve even started paying the ‘0% repayments with nothing to pay for a year’.
I see the interiors of most new cars generally look fantastic, simply oozing ‘perceived’ quality. Then I read on internet forums about quite a few ‘premium’ manufacturers (whatever happened to those?), only to see multifarious complaints about trim rattling or falling off, seat leather prematurely wearing and all sorts of mechanical issues that simply shouldn’t happen.
Then the motoring press tell us they have thoroughly long-term-tested ‘their’ example to Tesco and back a few times and nothing went wrong! Come on, guys, we need some more honesty. If a car has real ‘quality’, then tell us by all means, but ‘perceived’ quality tells us nothing. Roy Bush Leamington Spa, Warwickshire Perceived quality is how it looks and feels. That’s important. Real quality is how it’s actually built. That’s more important and we report on that too, but you can’t confuse the two, which is why we use a different phrase. Anybody saying a car has a ‘good quality interior’ off the back of a short first drive in it either doesn’t understand what ‘quality’ means or doesn’t care – MP