Part of the problem is how they calculate the reliability. Basically, any trip back to the dealer can count as a mark against your brand's reliability.
That means the guy who claimed there was a spot in the headliner of his brand new Dodge Nitro, after he got an oil change, is a reliability issue.
The lady who would come back to the dealership every month, claiming she heard a squeak that we could never reproduce, was several reliability claims.
The other lady who claimed that her A/C got "warm" on long trips -- also a non-reproducible problem, despite numerous test drives and letting the vehicle idle for hours in the parking lot taking temp readings every 15 minutes, was also multiple reliability claims.
Also, people who have spent $70k+ on a car, expect everything to work right and be perfect, and when they don't understand something, they come screaming back. Most of this is the sales rep's fault for not explaining it -- like the lady who had to come back to figure out how to turn her dome light off when she accidentally turned it on. He had never gone over the vehicle with her.
