The meaning of the four indices – APEAL, IQS, VDS, and TXI, to consumers in the future

By Jeff Lee / Mike Song 2022-09-26

The most important things in the competition between carmakers are sales volume and market share, of course. Apart from this, the competition that shown to the public is mostly from usual group tests conducted by automotive media. However, when discussing about the deeper and thorough comparison of carmakers from several aspects, it must be nothing else but J.D. Power. This is not just a reference for consumers when buying cars, but also the annual self-review for carmakers. The contents of market survey from J.D. Power in the future have to continuously adjust as the new era of automobile comes, and even how the contents after the next 10 years can be compatible with traditional ICE cars and advanced autonomous driving BEVs will be the biggest challenge to the fairness of the ratings in this report.

J.D. Power is a world-famous market survey company, especially well-known for the index of every aspect of automotive industry, and people who works at carmakers or distributors take the annual report as the most important index of reference for the performance of their company in addition to sales numbers. In Taiwan market, SSI (Sales Satisfaction Index) and CSI (Customer Service Index) are the two of the J.D. Power annual reports that consumers are familiar with; However, when viewing from a more foresighted aspect, the importance to consumers of the two indices - SSI and CSI that are more human-driven will be getting lower. Especially when moving toward the era of intelligent BEVs, the key points of product design and user experience , the full-implementation of e-commerce, the change of aftersales operation, all will lead the consumers’ focus on the contents of J.D. Power’s reports to APEAL, IQS, VDS, and TXI. The scale of Taiwan market is small so these reports hasn’t been conducted for a long time (TXI is an all-new survey since two years ago), which means there’s less reference for consumers to buy cars; However, in the annual reports of major markets around the world, these reports are very comprehensive that are worthy of referencing. Now, let’s see how these four indices are interpreted in the world of automobile in the future…

 

  • APEAL: The overall rating of the product competitiveness after 90 days of ownership. It includes styling, specification & features, driving performance, fuel consumption, etc., These ratings that are mostly determined by the subjective feelings from drivers have to be significantly adjusted in the era of autonomous driving BEVs… Most part of the journey was driven by carputer so that driving performance will be out of consideration. Instead, the driving smoothness and the capability to deal with “corner cases” of the autonomous driving vehicles should replace it for rating.  The fuel consumption should be replaced with range, the charging rate, and the time needed to be fully-charged (to 80%).  As for equipment, it means the content of equipment when purchasing the car; but if new equipment/functions can be downloaded with a bargaining price (or even for free) via OTA in the future? If the APEAL excludes it, then it must be placed in the TXI.
  • IQS: Problems discovered in the first 2~6 months of ownership, which is shown as problem per every 100 cars (PP100), and the number is the smaller the better. In the era of autonomous driving BEVs, the frequency of the needs for drivers to take over the car driving will be the extremely important rating in IQS, and I assumed that it needs to be weighted more for rating; as for the design of the questionnaire for weighting, J.D. Power should discuss with the industry and the academic as soon as possible to settle down. In addition, the status when conducting fast-charging or slow-charging should also be listed in the survey of IQS.
  • VDS: Vehicle problems encountered in the past 6 months between the 13th to 48th months of ownership, which is also shown as PP100. This is the level of the durability and reliability of vehicles shown by longer ownership measurement than IQS. Furthermore, to view from autonomous driving BEVs, the attenuation rate of power battery capacity will be very important… This can be rated based on the range after the battery is fully-charged. Moreover, whether the autonomous driving system become “smarter” after at least one year of use, which has lower frequency of the needs for drivers to take over car driving, should be listed in the VDS rating; if it doesn’t become “smarter”, then should it be assumed as a problem?
  • TXI: The using experience of tens of technology features (including the ratio of installment and usage) in the first 90 days of ownership to demonstrate the creativity of that brand. This index focuses on the implementation and the user experience of new technology, which encourages carmakers to be creative, instead of focusing on mature technology. To view from the TXI reports of the two major car market – China and USA, BEV startup companies generally receive higher ratings, and German and Korean brands have better ratings among traditional carmakers. In the rating of TXI, the marks will be deducted if the advanced technology that had been implemented isn’t mature or easy to use (such as gesture control). The current questionnaire of TXI includes most of the new technologies at the moment, and it will definitely keep being updated, and the weighting of L4/L5 autonomous driving technology will be increased in the future in this questionnaire. On the other hand, new types of battery technologies, AR with interaction of driving environment, and innovative layout of infotainment system and HMI, will also be the key points for TXI to be newly-added in the future.

Because J.D. Power is a market survey for owners, so it can’t represent the ranking of each brand by the public, and there will be some difference of subjective opinions between loyal owners and new owners, which will be an unfavorable situation for startup brands ( few or no loyal owners). However, it’s a fair survey as the content of questionnaire is the same. To sum up, these indices will ultimately provide a platform with common understanding of reference for carmakers and consumers; carmakers with low rating should make more efforts, and carmakers with high rating can’t be complacent by single index because it can just reveal the relative advantages or disadvantages among competitors, and then it can be the focus of work plan in the coming years.