It's ALL opinion since no one has to send in any documentation to support their claims. If someone wants to ignore the problems they can just answer "no problems". You don't seem to understand human nature. For this kind of survey to have any real validity beyond being a popularity contest it would have to be based on DOCUMENTED work orders for repairs of all these vehicles, say from the records of a leasing company or taxi fleet. We've had mostly GM in our government fleet for over 20 years and we just don't have much in the way of problems with them yet to listen to the critics we'd be lucky if half of them were running at any given point in time. The last new GM I had (95 caprice) required perhaps $1000 in actual non-wear item repairs (both in and out of warranty) in the 12 years and 140K miles of service. The entirety of it's repairs was to fix two electric windows and one sensor on the transmission. Yet some fool on the CU survey could, and probably would, put down 3 major repairs while swearing they'd never buy another domestic.
Not at all, I've seen their questionnaire.
Sorry but human nature is such that the typical Toyota owner, who bought it because it was supposed to be so great, is not going to acknowledge that he paid a higher price and has just as many problems as he's had with every other car. So he's going to forget about half the repairs and not even list them. And to cement the rightness of his decision he'll say he'd buy one again. OTOH, the Chevy owner shrugs nothing off. He feels like he did GM a favor buying the car in the first place and by god if there is a defect he's going to make them pay dearly by giving it lots of poor ratings - that'll teach em.
You don't understand that people rarely tell the truth for a wide variety of reasons. And the CU survey depends 100% on the respondents telling the truth about what is, to a large number of people, a very emotionally charged large $$ purchase.