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Fiat Chrysler wins top Total Quality Award for first time

The Strategic Vision Total Quality Awards are 20 years old in 2015, and Chrysler has never topped the awards before. Until now, that is. Fiat Chrysler takes the overall award on the corporate level with six segment leaders from Fiat, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram. The Fiat 500 won Small Multi-Function Car, the 500e won Small Alternative Powertrain, the Dodge Challenger tied at the top in the Specialty Coupe category alongside the very un-coupe Mini Cooper Countryman, the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited took the Entry SUV category, the Dodge Durango won in Mid-Size SUV, and Ram took the overall in Best Non-Luxury Brand. The accolade means FCA has gone from one segment winner in 2010 to overall victory in five years. Cars have gotten so good, says Strategic Vision, that it is harder than ever to win. In fact, says the group, 18 years ago 85 percent of all vehicle brands had more than half a problem per vehicle. This year, no brand has more than half a problem per vehicle. The organization measures "over 155 specific aspects of the customer's experience," and scores are based on input from more than 46,000 customers. Other notables in and near the winner's circle include Volkswagen and General Motors, who tied for second place on the corporate scale, one point behind FCA. The Mini Cooper Roadster scored the highest of any model, the Corvette Stingray Convertible and Coupe scored the second- and third-highest. The Chevrolet Colorado is the first domestic Standard Pickup winner in more than ten years, and the Nissan Titan carried the Full-Size Pickup category. The press release below has all the details on how winners and losers are selected, and the full list of automakers and how they finished. "The Customer's 'Total' Experience Defines Quality, Fiat Chrysler Scores Highest in Total Quality," says Strategic Vision The 2015 Total Quality Awards® SAN DIEGO, Friday, July 17, 2015 — Unknown to many, when some consumer research firms rank a car company's quality performance they often do so by simply "counting problems." In the past, this may have been acceptable, but in today's modern and efficient manufacturing world the difference between the worst brand and best brand is LESS than half-a-problem per vehicle. Thus, any "quality ranking" based on this method is severely lacking in the complete picture of the "Total" Quality experience that customers actually use to judge their product ownership.

Woman who gives birth on video in moving car gets another surprise

A mother of (now) five gave birth on video in her minivan on the way to the hospital last week, and she was just gifted a brand new Chrysler Pacifica minivan by none other than Jimmy Kimmel. He brought the now viral family live on air to talk about the crazy experience. The birth video is stunning, scary, but hilarious too once you realize who all is in the car. Alexis Swinney, the mother, was reportedly only minutes away from the hospital when the baby just couldn't wait any longer. Swinney's husband filmed the entire thing while driving (not recommended) on the way to the hospital. Kimmel echoed our thoughts on this exactly, "The whole time I'm watching, I'm thinking put the camera down and drive the car!" As she gives birth, he swivels the camera back to their other children in the rear seat with shocked looks on their faces — they just witnessed their mother giving birth to their new sister. Obviously the car was a complete mess after giving birth, so Kimmel did the best he could to help them out. "We were concerned that things might not be clean in the car anymore, so we called our friends at Chrysler ... so we're upgrading you. Go ahead, go in there, have a couple more kids," Kimmel said. This story transitioned from scary to unbelievable, and finally, incredibly heartwarming. The family can now pack all of their kids into the wonderful children transporting machine that the Pacifica is.Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

Honda may recall up to 1M vehicles for airbag issue, following Toyota's lead

It seems Toyota won't be the only one recalling the faulty Takata airbag inflators for long. Honda insiders in Japan claim that the company is getting close to announcing its own worldwide campaign that would begin before the end of June.
Unnamed sources close to Honda in Japan tell Automotive News that the company is pursuing an internal investigation into possibly affected models and is working with Takata to gather more information. They claim that it could involve even more than the 1.14 million cars worldwide that the automaker covered under the first recall for the problem in April 2013, including 561,000 vehicles in the US.
Toyota jumpstarted this process last week when it recalled over 2 million cars worldwide, including 844,277 in the US. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began a preliminary evaluation into the issue following six reported incidents, and started assembling data about potentially affected models from Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Chrysler. NHTSA also began investigating Takata itself.