Archived Copies of Warranty Week

December 2002 to Today

Supplier Recovery Estimates: While automotive parts suppliers pay roughly 10% of the industry's warranty expenses now, their "fair share" could be as high as 37%. But there's no way to get them to pay that much, so supplier recovery efforts are stuck in a contentious standoff between the OEMs and their suppliers.
April 18, 2019
Japanese Auto Warranties: While Toyota, Nissan and Honda dominate, six other companies also pay claims and make accruals for cars, trucks and buses made in Japan, or made elsewhere by a Japanese company. And while none besides Toyota & Honda report all their warranty metrics, most leave enough clues for outside observers to plug the holes with estimates.
October 11, 2018
Worldwide Automobile Warranties: Manufacturers representing well over 90% of the world's car sales now reveal their warranty expenses in their financial statements. So we've fashioned estimates for the remainder to create some benchmarks for the industry's warranty expense rates: 2.6% of revenue and $577 per vehicle.
August 16, 2018
GE & UTC Service Contract Estimates: Their jet engine operations may generate billions a year in service contract revenue, as evidenced by the tens of billions of dollars in deferred revenue carried on their balance sheets. But without hard numbers to go by, we have to estimate the size of their protection programs.
August 2, 2018
Worldwide Automotive Warranty Report: With hard numbers in hand for the warranty costs of roughly 80% of the world's car and light truck manufacturers, we set out to create estimates for the remaining 20%. And not surprisingly, we find that the highest warranty costs are in Europe and North America, with the lowest in Asia.
July 6, 2017
Warranty Adjustments: When a company finds that its actual warranty costs are above or below its predictions, it makes a change of estimate and adds or removes funds from its warranty reserve. While in general, removals are good and additions are bad, some companies seem to be correcting their estimates in every single quarter.
November 5, 2015
Computer OEM Warranty Metrics: There are multiple ways to look at the same statistics. And there are multiple ways to gauge cost-cutting, consistency, and accuracy with warranty totals and estimates. In different ways, using different metrics, Apple, HP and Dell are each leading their industry.
December 13, 2012
Warranty Estimates, Part 3: Companies in the building trades are supposed to carefully estimate the size of their warranty liabilities. But sometimes, their estimates are too low, and the amount they set aside is too meager to pay all their expected claims.
November 21, 2012
Warranty Estimates, Part 2: Automotive companies are supposed to carefully estimate the size of their warranty liabilities. But sometimes, their estimates are too low, and the amount they set aside is too meager to pay all their expected claims.
November 15, 2012
Warranty Estimates, Part 1: Companies are supposed to carefully estimate the size of their warranty liabilities. But sometimes, their estimates are too low, and the amount they set aside too meager to pay all their claims.
November 8, 2012
Don't TREAD On Me: Estimates of the cost of TREAD Act compliance vary all the way from the U.S. government's own $89 million figure up to a $1.7 billion estimate recently published by AMR Research. While small manufacturers continue to count their actual costs, the government continues to insist those costs will be close to zero.
November 3, 2003
The Warranty Reserve Fund: Now that warranty accruals and warranty claims numbers are in the public domain, it's time to look at the differences in warranty reserve fund sizes and the estimates that are used to produce these differences.
July 7, 2003