Method for determining useful life of a vehicle
A method for determining the useful life of a vehicle includes a distribution process for estimating a size of at least one group of vehicles; a determining process for determining a size of a subgroup of the vehicles, wherein each vehicle of the subgroup has a common defect; and a calculating process for calculating a useful life based on the size of the subgroup and the size of the group.
1 . A method for determining a useful life of a vehicle, comprising:
estimating a size of at least one group of vehicles, wherein each vehicle in the group is bounded by a specified age range;
determining a size of a subgroup of vehicles within the at least one group of vehicles, wherein each vehicle in the subgroup of vehicles shares a common defect; and
calculating a useful life based on the size of the subgroup and the size of the group.
2 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the determining step determines the size of the subgroup based on repair information of each vehicle in the at least one group.
3 . The method according to claim 1 wherein the common defect is a defect of a specified component that is found in each vehicle within the subgroup.
4 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the specified age range is defined by a specified mileage range.
5 . The method according to claim 12 , further comprising:
calculating a subset useful life for at least one subset of the vehicles in the at least one group of vehicles;
wherein the subset contains vehicles in the subgroup of vehicles that share a common attribute.
6 . The method according to claim 5 , wherein the subset useful life is a number of vehicles in the subgroup that are also members of the subset divided by a number of vehicles of the subgroup.
7 . The method according to claim 5 , wherein the subset useful life has a decision tree process for determining the subset useful life.
8 . The method according to claim 5 , wherein:
the subset useful life calculating step calculates a second subset useful life for at least a second subset of the vehicles;
wherein the second subset contains vehicles of the group that have a second common attribute.
9 . The method according to claim 8 , further comprising:
deciding on a lowest useful life between the first useful life and the second useful life;
whereby the deciding step at least in part explains the variance of the useful life of the common defect.
10 . The method according to claim 5 , wherein the common attribute is a vehicle type, transmission type, component type, manufacturing location or a vehicle driver type.
11 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the estimating step uses a Kaplan-Meier survival estimate to estimate the size of the group.