Consumer Reports rates minivans

Sounds right, My neighbor has a 2004 Nissan, And the problems, with fit and finish is absurd. The vents in the roof fell out, the seats are unravelling, the windshield is covered in tiny little airbubbles. the door pulls came off. Drives fine though! Nice ride and handling. Ugly though.

Yes, but could be like my Honda Accord. The engine was very quiet until the cam and lifters began to fail at around 70K miles and then it got very noisy. My Grand Voyager is a little noisier than the Honda was when new, but it hasn't become appreciably more noisy in 162,000 miles!

Matt

Wow, Honda with it's Transmission problems still did better?

I get a kick out of all these Jap vans being rated tops, but push come to shove I see many more Caravans rolling off dealership lots.

So what'd they do - use the old GM technique of nitriding the cams? Works great until the super-hard but micro-thin nitride layer wears thru (at around 70 to 110k miles), then wears like butter.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my adddress with the letter 'x')

I was surprised that the Honda did not suffer in the surveys because of the AT problems. Reportedly though Honda did everything they could to make customers happy until replacement AT's were available so maybe their customers forgave them when filling out the surveys. Either that or the rest of the van is so reliable it made up for the AT problems.

The Chrysler mini-vans will get a great rating when they switch to superior bushings, sway bar links, a direct fuel injection motor, independent rear suspension and a next generation automatic transmission.

On my personal list:

1. Amber rear turn lights.
2. Truly superior headlights
3. A CD changer that recognizes DVD-R and RW disks, digital AM and FM, and a multi-channel decoder for SACD/DVD-A/MP3 and WMP.
4. A switch back to decent tires or something like Michlin HydroEdge or Goodyear TripleTred tires.

Honda will then it its dust.

Yet without those, for years the Caravan always had high marks for very "car-like" feel.

As far as the engine, Chrysler has popped out a couple bad ones in their time, so I don't see any major problems with them sticking with the known reliable 3.3 and 3.8 L engines. I'd rather reliable over high tech any day.

Maybe they'll put a hemi in

I noticed that the Japanese vans get more horsepower and better fuel mileage with less displacement. Also CR has been mentioning headlights for a while now and including them in their ratings, maybe they've heard Bro. Stern. Brian, in Cedar

Is this actually going to happen?

I am happy to see they added headlight reviews. Hopefully it will lead to better headlights overall. Not much brand consistency from what I can see in their reviews of headlights.

Consumer Reports doesn't know how to test anything.

Larry Behold Beware Believe

We since Chrysler just pulled out the duel function duel bulb red rear lights for a one bulb combined stop, marker and turn function; to save a few cents, I would not hold my breath. Apparently all that talk about safety from Chrysler is just more bull.

Richard.

I have no idea what the underlying problem was, I just know that the pads on the rocker arms and the cam lobs each had at least 1/16" of metal worn away and were terribly spalled. All 16 were worn aobut equally. Shortly after the car was repaired I traded it for an 89 Acclaim. Best deal I ever made!

Matt

The current combined stop-tail-turn is DEFINITELY better/safer than separate adjacent "duelling red" tail/brake and tail/turn lamps. With the "duelling reds" if the brake is on it's impossible to see the turn signal until you're right on top of the van (or car...'98.5-'01 Audi A4, post-'97 Taurus/Sable especially wagon, Honda Civic '01-up, Honda Accord '05...)

But yes, red rear turn signals are stupid.

"Not hardly".

I kept a close ear on a CU staffer (Associate Editor of CR) at the Transportation Research Board Visibility Committee headlamp conference in January of 2003. He sat in on all the right paper presentations and discussion sessions, asked lots of good questions of lots of good experts in the field of automotive lighting (and got lots of good answers).

...And, after all that, he managed to write an article full of just plain old ordinary false information. Not just different opinions, I'm talking about factually *wrong* information. That's *after* factoring out open questions, matters of opinion and suchlike. I saw and heard the input, and I read the output that resulted. The input was like fresh hay going into the North end of a horse. The output was like used hay coming out the South end of the same horse.

And it didn't stop with just one article -- CR now "rates" headlamps according to a contrived and utterly unrealistic set of criteria they seem to have pulled out of thin air.

DS

I understand the equine comparison. Do you suppose they just don't get it, or do they have an agenda?

Finally someone realizes that headlights aint all the same. You won't hear that at Motor Trend. Brian, in Cedar

Once I was behind an Audi with duel red signals, he put his brakes on, and put his blinker on. A passenger in my car said "Stupid asshole should learned to signal" I pointed out that he did but it was hidden in the brake lights, and if he had amber turn signals it would be much more visible (this passenger is against amber signals)

... not including 2000+ sedans.

New Sentras are really bad. There is a tiny little red turn signal hidden in the middle of a gigantic red brake light.

Agree.

Well, no real headlamp-related agenda, I don't think. Just their normal agenda of pretending to be experts in everything from wine to oil filters.

Of course headlamps aren't all the same. Haven't been since 1983. (And if you want to be a *real* stickler for semantic accuracy, they haven't been since 1957.) But it does little good to print up magazines that say "Hey! Headlamps ain't all the same!" if you go on to "explain" the differences completely incorrectly, and then proceed to make completely unrealistic, nonsensical ratings and recommendations based on that "explanation".

DS

The wife's 2003 Dodge Stratus is pretty bad too...one can hardly see the red turn signal when the brake lights are also lit. Now my 2004 Sebring (basically the same car) has amber rear signals...it makes all the difference in the world! Those you *can* see very clearly regardless if the brake lights are lit or not.