[gahammerle]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

Quality does not mean the same thing as capability. Quality is about being free from defects/problems/failures. Or to put it another way, being & doing what its supposed to.

According to your logic, a sledge hammer is higher quality than an ordinary carpenters hammer because it hits harder. And since a normal hammer can only hit with say 1/10th the force, it should cost 1/10th as much & anyone who buys anything other than a sledge for hammering purposes is naive. But its simply a different tool for a different purpose. A sledge is too big and unwieldy most of the time. Sure, sometimes its extra capability comes in real handy. Yet 99.9% of the time, not only does a smaller hammer work just fine for the job at hand but its better explicitly because of its smaller size.

But whether or not something is suitable for a particular task has pretty much nothing to do with quality. Sticking with hammer quality, you'd need to look at things like the hardness of the face. Is it so hard that its brittle & chips easily? Or is it too soft and easily picks up dents & dings? Is the handle smooth or does it have bumps or hard edges? Is the head likely to slide or break off the handle? And so on. Those are the kinds of things that determine if a hammer is high quality or not. Additionally, if it has nifty features like vibration attenuation or, I don't know, a laser sight (its ... hard to imagine a fancy hammer), they don't automatically raise the quality of the hammer. If that fancy laser sight breaks or falls off or is misaligned or works sporadically, its low quality. But a hammer with decent vibration absorption makes it that much easier to use repeatedly, allowing you to hit more things with it in a given day.

I'll stop here. I could keep going on all day about the details that determine the quality of something as simple as a hammer (which pretty much has 1 function: hit things). For a car (or truck) that is vastly more complex, it would take forever. But I hope you get the gist of the difference between quality, capability, and features. Even though they can be interrelated, they are not interchangeable.

This hits the nail on the head!