New designs make car buyers happy, J. D. Power APEAL survey finds

Buyers of 2011 vehicles are happier with their choice if the car or truck is a new design instead of a carryover model, according to a survey results released on Wednesday, even though new designs are more prone to quality problems.

The Hyundai Equus luxury sedan was the top-ranked car in J. D. Power and Associates' Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout (APEAL) study. The industry overall scored 781 points on a 1,000-point scale in the study--its all-time high since the study was launched 15 years ago.

But the study also found a gap of 29 points between buyers of redesigned vehicles and carryover models.

The study seeks to measure how much owners like the new cars they bought in 2011 and how passionate they are about their purchases, said Raffi Festekjian, J. D. Power's director of global automotive.

Customers participating in the study rank how much they like and dislike every aspect of their vehicle on a scale of one to 10. About 73,000 people participated in this year's mailed survey.

Not surprisingly, many of the top-scoring brands in the survey are luxury automakers. Porsche was the No. 1 brand for the seventh consecutive year, scoring 879 points in this year's survey.

In addition to the top score for the Equus, Hyundai was the most improved nameplate this year, moving up 33 points from the 2010-model-year survey. Hyundai was helped by high consumer satisfaction with the Sonata and Elantra redesigns.

Jeep and Chrysler were the second and third most improved brands, with the Grand Cherokee redesign likely driving Jeep's improvement.

In more good news for domestic automakers, the top three vehicles that improved the most from last year are all domestic--the Dodge Charger, the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Ford Explorer.

View the full survey results here.

By Julie Alvin