Reliability, like probability at last, depends on a lot of subjective factors. The main reason which it will depend for of factors correlated to the market, similar products and tangible and intangible characteristics of the own product. I do not think that its value come to 1 in the great majority of the cases, although its tendency to that value suggests a good positioning on the market.
There are many way to get the new product reliability. One of them is, from lab accelerated test data it can be estimated the product reliability for normal operating condition for a certain period of time. Another way is if this new product is an improvement of previous model then historical field data can use to get a notion of new product reliability.
Reliability of all new equipment/ products at the beginning of its life should be 1 but its failure rate is different. The failure rate can be estimated by means of some methods such as part count, Fault tree, etc..
Reliability of a product is a wide area if you ask so. When you are launching a product then it depends on what kind of product are you dealing with. If you are dealing with a microbial product or by-product then you have to consider the fact that it does not changes its nature or it shouldn't be developing into a toxic end product. Finally if it is able to meet its purpose throughout its shelf life then you can consider it to be reliable. The best way to check its reliability is by performing a lab to field test and if the data meets your purpose then you can opt for an market analysis.
Reliability includes three types of failures, early life failures, useful life failures and wear out failures. Put these together over time make a bathtub looking like distribution.
Early life failures are escaping production or delivery failures and the rate decreases over time. These failures are removed through elevated or accelerated testing.
The useful life failures are roughly a constant and low failure rate, which is designed in.
After useful life the wearout failures occur that are just function of the life of the product. Early life failures are addressed normally through the warranty failures, but the useful life failures defines the product brand. As a supplier, we need to keep the useful life failures low, and early life failures caught as much as in production.
When the product is launched, the reliability is an estimated reliability or predicted failure rate based on component and subsystem failure rates. This is measured in FIT, failure in time, normally billion hours, and MTBF or the mean time between failures.
More you can learn by simply Googling. I hope it helps.
Reliability of a product does not directly related to the launching program but rather the product function operation. When a product is launched, it means that the product enters the useful life and has a constant failure rate. In term of design, the product has a mature design and ready to use. Reliability is a probability that a product able to function normally until a certain time. So, reliability depends on time (its life time) not launching program. At the beginning of its life time, reliability of a product should be 1. It means that probability of the product will be able to function successfully is very high.
If you could define a reliability in terms of its constituents, such as time-span (its life time), durability, time to failures, Number of failures, functionality, predicted failure rate based on component and subsystem failure rates, and MTBF or the mean time between failures, one could then create a normalized cumulative factor (between 0 and 1) along the lines of what is described in the following paper.
Conference Paper Life-Cycle Measures and Metrics for Gaining Manufacturing Op...