Surprised that Infiniti actually provides a significant improvement over Nissan's numbers. Also looks like I need to drive my MR-2 Spyder more as a lot of us weekend drivers are bringing the avgs down. The fact that most MR2s over the year have used the same drive and powertrains found in the Corolla, I'm likely to blame user error by incompetent manual drivers the most for those stats (apart from the blip of precat failures).
Mini...wow, just wow. Making Suzuki and VW look good is no easy feat.
Nissan had enormous problems getting US production off the ground, whereas most Infinitis were or are still made in Japan. That would explain a lot of the differences. More recently, Nissan's CVT has been incredibly unreliable, whereas almost all Infintis still use traditional autoboxes. The exception is the JX35/QX something or other, which is a Pathfinder in a pretty frock as Clarkson likes to say.
Infinitis for the most part have pretty good mechanical and electrical reliability. The sore spots for them were many years of Gs tearing through pads and rotors, problems with the seats not staying attached to the tracks, and of course the infamous interior trim quality.
Over 10 years and hundreds of cars tested, Cnet's Car Tech program had exactly one car completely die on them, necessitating a tow back to the dealer - a Mini. It really shouldn't come as a shock, take BMW's proclivity for over-engineered complexity and underdesigned and underspeced parts made to last precisely as long as the warranty holds, and then start cutting corners to get the price down below 1 series levels.
