Archived Copies of Warranty Week

December 2002 to Today

Honda & Toyota Warranty Report: Both companies are recovering from some bad years in terms of warranty costs: Honda in fiscal 2016 and Toyota in fiscal 2017. But according to the figures in their brand new annual reports for the just-finished year of fiscal 2018, both companies are now on the mend, with warranty costs that are still unusually elevated, but not as high as they were a year or two ago.
July 5, 2018
Apple's Warranties & Service Contracts: Although it is one of the world's largest warranty providers and extended warranty administrators, both programs used to be even larger. Using figures from Apple's just-published annual report, we estimate the size of each.
November 9, 2017
Top 100 Warranty Providers of 2015: Most of the major warranty providers have published their annual reports in the past few weeks. By comparing their most recent warranty claims, accrual, and reserve metrics against the same expense figures from a year ago, we can make a series of top 10 lists of the most improved and the most injured warranty providers.
March 17, 2016
Apple's Extended Warranties: Every once in a while, someone sues Apple over its sales of extended warranties. But they never quantify the amount of money involved. Turns out, it's huge, based on some assumptions we made using figures from the company's own annual reports.
January 17, 2013
Automotive Warranties: GM and Ford are cutting their warranty expenses and closing the gap with both their competitors and their suppliers. And it's beginning to get some notice in the daily newspapers. Truck makers aren't as lucky, but their year-ago figures weren't as dreadful.
June 3, 2010
Ford's Warranty Costs: Figures presented at the Warranty Chain Management Conference last week showed a massive drop in the automaker's warranty expenses. But that had much to do with the accounting for the soon-to-be-sold Jaguar and Land Rover divisions. Still, even after adjusting year-ago figures to account for that impending sale, Ford's warranty costs are down significantly.
March 12, 2008
Worldwide Automotive Warranties: Sure there are good numbers for the U.S.-based automakers, but what about the rest of the world? With a few educated guesses, we're able to estimate the worldwide auto warranty number to be $36.9 billion, roughly 3.4 times U.S. figures alone. But it's different for every size of vehicle, and exchange rate and warranty duration also have an effect.
May 30, 2007