Isn't this just stack ranking? Hasn't that always been a terrible way to measure quality?
Every car, especially American makes, are drastically improved from even just a few years ago. Being in the bottom half in 2019 is a completely different story from being in the bottom half in 1999, or 1969.
The dynamics of how to evaluate a team of people that work together are quite different from ranking the quality of competitors in an industry. The reasons that stack ranking is bad don't really apply to choosing your next car manufacturer or to evaluating the relative health of US car companies versus others.
There have been plenty of drastic improvements in cars in the past 20 years, but I'm not convinced that reliability is one of them. Compared to 1969, definitely. Quality back then was awful. But there were plenty of very reliable cars around in the 90s, I'm still driving one of them.
Those Buicks having major transmission problems within the first year of ownership would have been considered a disaster even in 1969. Same with Ford's powershift transmissions from a few years ago that tended to last ~25K miles.
Every car, especially American makes, are drastically improved from even just a few years ago. Being in the bottom half in 2019 is a completely different story from being in the bottom half in 1999, or 1969.