Unfortunately, product quality after 150k miles of life doesn't tell you anything about what's coming off the line right now. Most of the company will have chu

Unfortunately, product quality after 150k miles of life doesn't tell you anything about what's coming off the line right now. Most of the company will have churned over in the intervening decade. The car which was built 10 years ago won't even be on the market right now. Even if the brand name is still the same (eg, long-lived pickup truck names like the F150), the vehicle itself will be completely different. So you might be interested in mid-life or end-of-life quality, but you can't measure it early in the vehicle's life without an accelerated life test of some kind, and you can't measure it statistically without doing so on many vehicles. JD Power's initial quality survey is just that: A simple consumer survey of defects reported early in the vehicle's life. Hence the name: initial quality.