J.D. "Dave" Power, Who Made Quality Count in the Car Industry, Has Died

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Hat tip, Jalopnik

J.D. “Dave” Power, Who Made Quality Count in the Car Industry, Has Died

If your car wasn’t in the top half of the J.D. Power chart, you had to get to work to get it there

BY MARK VAUGHN
JAN 25, 2021

James David Power III, who launched the business that bears his name as well as the awards appearing in millions of car advertisements, died Saturday. He was 89.

Power started his market research business in 1968. It was originally called J.D. Power and Associates; the associates, at first, were his wife and kids. He spent the early years pounding the pavement with his research, which none of the automakers — except perhaps Toyota — took seriously at first.

And then Mazda’s Wankel rotary engine came along.

From my profile of the business in 2017:

Power’s research would go far beyond what AMC or the auto industry in general was doing. J.D. Power asked new car buyers a variety of questions that were designed to get at the real experience of owning the car. Finding the owners, it turns out, was one of the easy parts, in the U.S. at least, since vehicle registration information here is generally a public record.

Which meant, in the early days, a shit ton of mail, with Power’s wife helping him tabulate the results from their kitchen table. His approach finally hit pay dirt in 1973, when owners of the Mazda R100 told the company that the Wankel rotary engines were failing at an alarmingly high rate. Specifically, a fifth of all buyers surveyed said that the engine failed somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 miles, because of bad O-ring gaskets. On May 7, 1973, the company’s report made the front page of The Wall Street Journal and overnight J.D. Power became an industry name, if not a household one just yet.

Mazda had previously not been a J.D. Power customer, though it would quickly become one. Or, as a Mazda company executive later told Power after the WSJ story: “Next time, I want you on my side.”

Indeed, in the years after the R100 story, almost every major automaker bought into J.D. Power’s market research — except GM, in keeping with its reputation for corporate insularity. GM finally caved though, too, in 1988, thanks to a fax that found its way in front of Roger B. Smith, the company’s powerful chairman. The fax announced that GM had fared well in the that year’s Initial Quality Study.

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