[Excaliber]

I don't know if Optima is having trouble with the newer ones or not. I take anecdotal posts with a grain of salt.

For instance, seeing a bunch of batteries, Optima or whatever, as "returns" is a tough way to determine the quality. What you see there would be typical of most manufacturers of any given product. There will always be a percentage of returns, and a percentage of those are going to be consumer problems not neccesarily manfacturer problems.

Johnson Controls is a really BIG player in the battery manufacturing arena, it has a pretty solid reputation. They make a bunch of batterys with various brand names, like the Sears Die Hard for instance and many others.

The thing is, "Optima" is THE global brand from Johnson Controls, it's hard to imagine they would sacrafice quality on their primary product. Sears Die Hard and other brands would be hard to know about, Johnson builds them to the customers specs, if the customer want less quality to save money, Johnson will do that.