Like I said, this was a REVIEW, not CU's reliability owners report issue.
As far as reliability of the drive train, yes I would agree with you and in fact both cars had very similar long term results.
But the two were like night and day to drive, which was my point.
Posted 9/16/2003 12:51 AM Updated 9/16/2003 5:02 AM Many car shoppers' first stop is 'Consumer Reports' By Earle Eldridge, USA TODAY
Consumer Reports has become so influential among car shoppers that some automakers now send preproduction cars to the magazine's test engineers for suggested changes before the vehicles hit showrooms.
General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler Group ? which often score less favorably than Toyota and Honda in Consumer Reports' ratings ? have sent sometimes-camouflaged vehicles to the magazine's Connecticut test facility. And they've made changes suggested by magazine engineers before putting vehicles into mass production.
It's a testament to the power of Consumer Reports' auto ratings. Automakers have often battled with the magazine about its testing and ratings. Now, "We value their feedback. They have credibility," says Ford spokesman John Arnone.
You can read the whole article at
HellT - bought a PT Cruiser recently and was glad to see CR had it on its 'recommended' list, but that wasn't the primary factor in my purchasing decision. After all, they also recommended the Toyota Matrix, and I didn't like the Matrix at all.
Ted, careful with your attributions. Near as I can tell, I didn't write a single line in this post, yet you kept my name in the attribution chain at the top.
Matt
They only poll their paid subscribers, not a randomly selected sample of the entire population of owner's of the various car brands. I doubt there is a magazine in print whose subscriber list isn't biased to some degree. Almost any self-selection process introduces bias and paid subscribers to any magazine are a self-selected set of the overall population. Are you really unable to grasp this very basic concept?
If the point is durability over time, then it is indeed biased. They should at least survey to the average age of cars on the road, which last time I saw data on that was well above 5 years of age. If you only plan to keep your car five years or less, then maybe the CR data is relevant, but I still think it is biased due to the sample set they use, even without the years of service bias. If you plan to keep your car ten years, then the CR data is virtually worthless. I'm in the latter camp, so I find their data next to worthless for me.
I don't recall ever seeing that stated. If I get a spare minute, I'll pull out the last annual auto issue and read the fine print again.
No, and you can't prove they aren't, but that isn't the bias I was referring to. I was referring to the bias induced by the sample only considering input from CR paid subscribers. If enough people feel they are biased against American cars that they have stopped subscribing (and I know several people who feel this way), then you have a subscriber base that is comprised of people who like Japanese cars better than American cars. If you now ask them to rate American and Japanese cars, you shouldn't be surprised at the answers you get.
Not necessarily. If all 500,000 are biased a given way and the 100 are a random and representative sample of the population, then the latter is much more meaningful.
For example, suppose I'm trying to decide what colors to offer in my next model year. I survey 1000 owners of blue cars and then survey 100 people who own cars with a wide range of colors that closely approximate the total population of cars in circulation. Which do you think will yield better data?
Yes, but so what? I don't know that CR gets even close to 500,000 responses and I don't know that JD Power gets only 100. And even if these numbers were correct, I'd rather have a sample of 100 that was selected to ensure statistical validity than 500,000 who are biased.
Matt
Because they might be made in different plants with different levels of automation, different materials and different levels of worker skill. A lot of what CR evaluates is not design related, but is assembly related or materials related.
Matt
Having credibility with the public doesn't make them right. Accounting auditors had a fair bit of credibility until Enron...
Matt
Note that if Ford had said "They don't have credibility" then the journalist would have asked "then why do you send cars to CR" and Ford would look pretty stupid.
Most likely the info was deliberately sent to the journalist by CR as part of their advertising campaign. Just because automakers may send a few cars to CR doesen't mean they value their input.
For a number of years I worked at Central Point Software (later acquired by Symantec, maker of the Norton tools) and it was routine to send prerelease software copies to all of the industry reviewers, along with a questionaire. The responses from the questionaire (if any were received) were round-filed. This kind of thing was done to make the reviewers feel important, in order to protect our flank from a nasty review from a reviewer who was upset that we didn't consider him important. In fact many times reviewers would submit their reviews to us to have us check technical accuracy so that _they_ wouldn't be embarassed if they said something stupid!
For all I know this is still going on today at Symantec. (It's been several years since I've worked for them, though)
So much for CR's claim that they are unbiased. If they truly were unbiased they would prohibit this practice.
Ted
Pointless, as they can make up any figure they want. And what matters isn't the total number returned, what matters is the percentage of surveys returned.
There are 3rd party auditing firms that audit these kinds of surveys for a living. Does CR use any of them? And if so, do they use them year after year or switch between different ones?
Ted
I have provided evidence that it's biased in my responses to you already, as have other people. I have also explained how this bias is introduced, which you apparently didn't understand the logic of. Matthew also explained the same thing using different words than I did and I don't see any evidence that you comprehend him any more than you comprehend what I have posted. Even more, he pointed out that the average automobile lifespan is far longer than 5 years, which even more points to giant shortcomings in the CR ratings.
No I am not, there you go again misunderstanding everything.
I said that ANY of the respondents that have problems are going to tend to blow them up out of proportion, no matter how big or small. One owner who has peeling trim will say it's a disasterous problem. Another owner who has a blown engine will say it's a disasterous problem. In short, they all are going to say their problems are disasterous. So, this is going to tend to skew the opinions against cars that have multiple small problems vs a few big ones.
And I also did not claim that import owners report differently than domestic owners, either. I am claiming that CR reports differently on domestics than imports. CR does not publish all the raw survey responses complete with comments. So it is impossible for a 3rd party to look at the raw data and cross-check the statistics to see if CR is doing it in an unbiased manner.
Ted
Yes, I agree with this as well. In hindsight the US automakers clearly understood at the time that the bias towards small cars and against large cars was artifical, and they must have thought that it would go away shortly, so why spend effort on making a good small car. I don't think that anybody thought that it would take a generation before the US society would move back to it's natural state - in love with big, fast gas-guzzling cars, and I'm sure that nobody figured that the trend back would start with the minivan and SUV!!
The other thing that I have to wonder is what influence the baby boomers had on it? It seems to me that 1975-1985 which were the golden years of the econobox, seems to coorespond with the baby boomers being in their
30's which if I'm not mistaken, is typically when people buy their first "brand new" car. Maybe the Aquarius generation got it warped into their brains that cars were supposed to be the size of the VW Bug? Maybe the children of the Aquarius generation are rebelling against their parents by buying fat-assed SUVs and Minivans, 20 years later?Since CR creates the testing methods, if the testing methods are biased against American cars, than how can you say that CR itself isn't biased against American cars? They must read their own results and they must see that there is a skew going on.
If they really have that much influence then all cars will eventually look the same - ie: the way CR wants them to look. I wonder what they will do then to pick winners and losers? ;-)
Ted
Cite one review that's ever mentioned this.
The M-body suspension was the same as the F-body. Yes, the interior was different, as was the exterior, but neither affect things like ride and handling.
So how does that affect things? Can you provide any evidence that CR's readers who own one brand ignore problems while those readers of another brand call every little problem "major"? CR's reviews and owner-reported reliability are comparisons, so unless you can show a bias on the part of the owners, your complaint is baseless.
Sure, towards cars with few problems. But if the readers who own imports are reporting fewer problems than those who own domestics, Occam's Razor dictates we assume the reason is imports have fewer problems, not some vast deliberate or even unconscious bias among hundreds of thousands of people towards imports.
Sure, but it makes no difference! If the magazine were "Import Cars," yes, we could assume the readers are biased in favor of import cars and that their answers to a survey might reflect this. But why would CR readers be biased towards imports?
CR calls their data "reliability." It goes back, if I remember correctly, 6 years. Nowhere do they purport it to show 10-year reliability.
Then provide some evidence that CR readers are biased in favor of imports just because they are imports.
You don't care if there're problems in the first 6 years?
Fine; I'd probably find Popular Photography worthless since I don't take pictures. But I don't go into a photography newsgroup and say they're biased, their reports are worthless, etc.
So how does that affect the data?
If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
That's an incredibly dumb remark.
Prove they are.
Prove CR's readers are biased.
Because you don't read CR. Yet you criticize it. That's dumb.
Interesting, when CR has gotten different reliability data for, say, the short minivans and the long ones in the past, people have said that shows CR's data is worthless, even though at the time those were made in different plants.
But worker skill wouldn't make a car ride and handle differently.
Sure, "fit and finish". But ride, handling, braking, performance, mileage, safety...
And it seems like you're indicting Detroit management and workers for not assembling cars as well. Does this make you feel better than indicting them for not designing cars as well?
Huh? Nobody sends cars to CR. CR buys every product it tests, including cars, at retail dealers. That's one reason they can be objective, unlike auto magazines that depend on the auto companies giving them cars.
Another case of a doofus criticizing CR without ever bothering to read it.
What practice?
Now you've gone from being dumb and are being stupid.
Why?
No, you've claimed they make up numbers and that they must be biased, just because you say so. I demand proof.
No, again, you claim they're biased. Prove it. Show that the owners respond differently due to the type of car they own.
Fine. They don't investigate what you want. If you think that's "bias," you're even dumber than I thought.
So again, how would this affect one brand differently from another?
Since Bush murdered babies in his youth...
Starting from an erroneous assumption just makes you look silly.
No, only people like you who DON'T read CR claim there is a bias.
Gee, Ted, ask their Magic-8 Ball, I guess.
You've got a Bible; look up where God tells Moses to build a spaceship.
snip-------
I never thought that it would happen!
We can all blame the yuppies back in the 80's for what we have now. All of a sudden Volvo's were the rage and the price went sky high. Then they went to BMW's and those prices skyrocketed. VW released the pocket rocket GTI in 1983/84 and it was a sleeper until the yuppies discovered that one as well.
The minivan was designed to replace the mostly ugly station wagons and cart around all the kids that the yuppies decided to pop out when in their mid/late 30's because they had wasted most of their 20's spending their money and developing their careers.
Now we have the former yuppies who have embraced the SUV's and the trend continues.
Where I live, bigger is better and I see women driving around town in humongous SUV's and trucks with double wheels in back and so forth.
Personally I think this country is going down the sewer.
I see your point.
I don't like CR because I find that much of what they say in their reviews has no meaning to me. The only exception is their long term survey's, and even those have some bias in them.
I remember reading a CR report on home loudspeakers where the testing methodology involved placing the speaker in an anechoic chamber, putting a calibrated microphone in front of them and sweeping the audio spectrum with a signal generator. Then they would plot the results and come up with a number which indicated the "accuracy" of each unit.
That's all well and fine except that loudspeakers are designed to be LISTENED to in typical living rooms, not anechoic chambers.
As a result some of the absolute worst sounding speakers were at the top of the list, the Bose speakers for example.
Toss a coin :)
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