Reliability Analysis of Vehicle Systems and Components

There are today many reliability analyses available that can be used on new product development or on products already in production. Warranty data is widely used on these studies and it shows the ability of a system or a component to perform its function on a regular customer usage. This warranty data is the cumulative incidents occurred during the warranty period offered by the automaker. This warranty period normally one year or 50,000 km is when the automaker will repair the vehicle with no cost or sometimes with the least amount to the customer. Depending on the automaker warranty data base system are measured by a hundred units or by a thousand units (I/100 or I/1000). The warranty data normally shows that only a small sample of the total population will have some incident during the warranty period and on these cases it is possible to obtain the mileage accumulated by these vehicles. However, to properly perform a reliability function analysis of one system or a component it is necessary to know the mileage of the vehicles that did not experienced any incident during the same period under study, often known as censored data. This paper presents a methodology for reliability analysis of automotive field failure warranty data where censored data is estimated by using the vehicle customer usage from the warranty data base.