Screw Consumer Reports

The density of some people posting such UTTER NONSENSE about Consumer Reports must exceed that of the inside of a black hole.

Come on people, face it, CR survey results come from responses of people who bought and own the cars they are responding about. They do not come from Consumer Reports. All they do is add up the responses. CR survey results are relied by intelligent folks in making buying choices for exactly that reason - the credibility of the guy who owns one...of lots of guys who own one, in fact.

Here's another one for you conspiracy kids who think that CR is out to get GM. I had a 2000 Yukon XL for five years and 30,000 miles. The thing was pampered. It was used as a traditional station wagon. It had lots of problems (fuel pump failure, dead power window motor, defective outside rear-view mirror (twice), cracked interior trim, rear window defroster failure, ABS sensor failure, power door lock control failure). The expensive stuff failed out of warranty and cost a total of $1400. Would have been $1800, but I replaced the rear window with an after-market instead of GM part. Yet, if you look at the CR rating for the Yukon XL it is pretty much average. I would consider it to be worse than average...and compared to our

1992 Lexus LS400 that we have had for 12 years, much, much worse than average. So as far as I'm concerned, CR went easy on the 2000 Yukon XL. Except they didn't because most folks have had less trouble than I did and that's what CR reports. The average of their responses.

Reply to
GRL
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Go read the interview with the guy who runs Toyota USA in the April Motor Trend and you will see why it is not at all hard to believe...and true. They really are VERY different from the domestics.

By the way, the Honda Passport is on the CR "shit list". Come to think of it, wasn't that an Isuzu, anyway?

Reply to
GRL

Nope, they are unquestionably subjective in terms of what they think a good car should be like. They traditionally like reliability, good mileage, good comfort, smooth ride, easy to use controls, good visibility, and so on. The kinds of things the average car buyer wants most, who is not a car enthusiast. And that is most of the car buying population.

They have traditionally not had too much to say to people who love to drive, but that has been changing. They have taken to testing performance cars...and they like what they test and say so. They like the Honda S2000, Porsche Boxter, Chevy Corvette, BMW M3, and Subaru Sti.Cars that the average car buyer would have no use for, but cars that enthusiasts hold in awe and that get high ratings in the buff books. But they deal with cars like that as a different category than mainstream cars. There is subjectivity, in other words, but it is appropriate for the audience.

If I was a person looking for a transportation appliance, as I think most people are when they car/van shop, I would pay very close attention to what CR writes and use them as a screen for what cars I will actually bother to personally look at. If they say a car/van is a dog, it will be. If they say it will be excellent, it will be. I may not like the styling or some particular feature, but I can have complete confidence that all they write about it will be true.

Reply to
GRL

I don't recall them ever testing anything as niche market as soldering equipment. Please supply the issue number. I have files dating back into the '80's and would love to see this faux pas.If what you are talking about pre-dates that, even if true, give me a break...I doubt if anybody who wrote what you claim they wrote is still even with CR.

Reply to
GRL

I don't think that anyone can argue that CR ratings are wholly objective. They are not because, as you say, somebody has to decide what is important and how important. Not hard art the gross level, but harder as you get into the fine points. Case in point. We needed to replace a refrig. As always, I check CR and find that Whirlpool's are reliable and that they also supply Sears and the Sears models are also reliable. Very minor difference in the ratings of the two brands from the comparison test CR did. We decide to by the Whirlpool flavor of a given model because we get a better price on a floor sample. We get it home, turn it on and the first night we have it I am shocked at how noisy it's compressor is. I recheck the CR ratings and see it is rated average for noise while the Sears model is rated better than average. More research reveals that the Sears version gets additional sound insulation. I end up PO'd because I have what I consider a noisy refrigerator. CR correctly reported that the Sears model is quieter, but they did not emphasize how much quieter or how noisy the Whirlpool is. I wish they had as I'd have bought the Sears. Somebody at CR made a subjective choice on reporting that I wish they had not made. (We got used to the noise, by the way.)

Your bias logic w.r.t survey responders holds no water, on the other hand. CR asks people about how much trouble they have had with their purchase. There is no politics in that question, there is no CR point-of-view to share - either the thing broke or it did not. I don't know what kind of bias you find in the selection of people who choose to respond to the surveys, either, that would impact the results so as to give an inaccurate result. If you say that people who have things break on them are more likely to respond, well OK, that means the companies that make crap will take it in the chops more than they would have otherwise, but that's OK - the quantitative result is off, but not the qualitative one (junk is still junk, but it may come out as worse junk than it really is good stuff is still good stuff, but it may come off as less good than it really is and still much better than the junk - you can still compare). If you say the opposite, than that just shifts results a little in the other direction, but relative differences still hold.

If anything, there will be a general tendency to forgive deficiencies "Neill Massello" wrote in message news:1hbqb1x.5z24g31fvgjokN% snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net...

Reply to
GRL

OK, CR asks subscribers how they like their products, remember that the majority of CR subscriber, not to be confused with readers, are tree hugging ultra left 60's hippies, which is the basis for much of their evaluation, Well, the foreign car owners want to justify their decisions, so they rate everything as rosy. If you want to voice your opinion on how great US cars are, then you need to subscribe to CR and provide a rating.

Reply to
E. BOROWICZ

Hi Mike,

My father in law is the fleet sales manager for one of the Ford dealerships here and you are right in every respect. The fleets simply do not get pricing that is lower than what the dealership pays the factory for, that is nonsense. Dealerships simply do not sell cars for less than what they paid, period. And the factory does not gave a damn about selling directly to the fleets at some special price. The factories know that the fleets are going to buy a lot of cars from them no matter what dealership the fleets use, and they don't sell at below their cost, either, or at least try not to. Since the factories price varies by volume that is how you get GM loosing billions, because they screwed up their forecasts of how many cars they were going to sell - so they sell fewer cars and their price to make the smaller volume is not as low as they thought. This is the only area that fleet sales are helpful to the manufacturer, because it increases volume which generally means lower prices to build that model, and if that model has a lot of rebadged versions, it can help. But, fleets are fickle too and the auto manufacturer has no way of knowing in advance what is going to be the popular fleet models for that year, save for a few specialized ones (like the crown vics which the cops use)

Fleet sales are desirable from a dealership perspective because it boosts the delaership sales volume and the vehicle manufacturers all have incentive programs that give bigger discounts to dealerships that sell more. In all truth of it, the entire thing is rediculous, because what it ends up doing is making it more cost effective for super-dealerships and corporations that own chains of dealerships to come into existence. You really do not want to buy a car from a corporate dealership if you can help it, since the people your buying it for don't really give a damn if you have a good experience or not. By contrast with the small dealerships the owner of the dealership is usually working right in the dealership every day and if a customer wants to see him, half the time he's walking around the sales floor.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

availability to

But, consider also that the Prius is full of special parts that are not widely used in all other Toyota models, and consider that the Prius has as much value as a lure to get customers into the dealerships, as an actual sale. People who are curious about hybrids in general will go to the Toyota dealership to look at the car, then Toyota is hoping to interest them in their other vehicles.

Toyota only needs to make enough Priuses to make the model profitable and no more than that. If they make too many of them then too many people have a Prius and the mysique of owning one is gone, and people lose interest. If they make too many of them then they cannibalize their other model sales. Look at what happened to the VW 'new beetle" VW ramped up production of bugs too fast and when too many of them got out there people decided they were just a gimmick and lost interest.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

We know that, but your missing the part about self-selection.

When CR subscribers get the survey, which ones are the most likely to turn them back in? I'll tell you, it is the people who are at each end of the bell curve - the people who are really really happy about their products and the people who are really really pissed off about their products. The people who don't care either way are much less likely to respond.

So if you have a manufacturer that makes really bad stuff they are going to take it in the chops. And if you have a manufacturer who makes really good stuff they are going to get high rated, right? Not so fast. In order to find out the truth you have to normalize the responses.

Normalization is the process where you cruch the numbers. For example, lets say you get 50 responses saying Toyota is great. And 50 responses saying GM is great. And this is out of 200 responses that were sent out meaning a 50% response rate.

CR takes this data and says GM and Toyota are both equally great. But the problem is that in the pool of 200 people that owned cars and were surveyed, 125 of them owned GM products.

So in reality, what you have is 50 out of 125, or 40% of the owners of GM's liked their vehicles so much as to respond that they were great. What were the other 60% thinking? Can you assume they hated their cars? If so then why didn't they reply. Can you assume that they merely thought their cars were OK? You just don't know. And you have a situation where 66% of the Toyota owners liked their vehicles so much as to respond that they were great.

So the conclusion here is that the Toyota responses were much more accurate because they were a much higher sample of the total population of CR subscribers that owned Toyotas. So the Toyota ranking in the magazine may be accurate, but the GM ranking is much less accurate. And the way the math happens to work, what this means is the larger the vehicle manufacturer is, and the more cars they sell, the higher the chances that their rankings are going to be inaccurate.

CR cannot normalize their surveys for the simple reason that they do NOT poll the subscribers they sent surveys to who did not respond, to get their opinions. If they actually polled all the CR subscribers - by calling them or some such - then their survey might have some value - although those results would have to be normalized by finding out what deviation from the average of the US population that the CR subscribers represent, but that also can be established during the polling process.

Anyway, getting back to the car vehicle survey problem. If the CR surveys showed tremendous differences, like every single Toyota owner loved every last thing about their car, and every single GM owner hated every last thing about their car, then the tremendous difference would be so great that even after normalization, it would still be a big difference. But that is not the case at all. The foreign cars that "won" the survey did so well within the margin of deviation of a normalized survey would be. If normalization had been done, it could have easily changed the results. But because it wasn't done, the results are basically worthless.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

"E. BOROWICZ" wrote in news:KpsQf.8827$ snipped-for-privacy@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net:

do you have some basis for this blatent bigotry? Honestly, can you provide a link showing that most CR subscribers are ex-hippies?

JP

Reply to
Jon Patrick

Hardly, he is desperate to justify so he makes stuff up to fit. He can not take objective reality.

Reply to
Jim Higgins

Yes, it was a rebadged Isuzu since Honda at the time had no SUVs

Reply to
Dave

Reply to
Dave

You are probably mostly right for hard-core enthusiasts, but you are dead wrong about a significant part of the performance car market who have never owned a sports car, but are at a point in their life where they want to reward themselves with something sporting, but don't really know what is good and what is not. These people do not read the car buff books and really are clueless beyond recognizing a brand/model as desirable.

The point is supported by the fact that many, if not most, high performance cars are sold with automatic transmissions...something that a real enthusiast would not have in a sports car or hot sports sedan.

Reply to
GRL

It would be interesting to see what the response rate is to the surveys.

I felt the same way about who would respond to the surveys that you do...until, after some 20+ years of responding I realized that I always respond and I do it whether a car has been very good, very bad, or just very average. The same with appliances. And then the question becomes, why do I think other people are any different than me in this regard...and there is no reason to think that they are. So I basically convinced myself that my preconceived notion was wrong. I now think the only pre-selection that goes on is in terms of who is willing to spend the few minutes it takes to "do" the survey and spend the money on postage to send it in. Given that people who subscribe to CR (and it is not cheap) are interested in how things perform and user ratings (why buy the thing, otherwise), I suspect the response rate is pretty high. However, I have not been able to find the response rate in a cursory search.

You misinterpret what normalization is. Normalization, in the case of a survey where the populations are different (number of responses for a given model) is basically just converting to percentages of people for each model who had trouble or did not in a given year. You absolutely have to do that since the populations are different for different models. It's a given. Otherwise, you would just be comparing raw numbers and could end up with some nonsense like saying a low responding model with 100 negative responses (i.e, there was a problem) giving the same rating result as a high responding model with 100 negative responses.

Now as to the problem of their survey not being truly random, it's true but it is also unavoidable. You cannot force people to respond. All surveys are voluntary. No one can. No one's survey is truly random as long as anyone asked to participate does not participate. However, I don't think that is a problem in reality (vs. theory) because all the survey results done by everyone track the same way. And that's year over year. The Asian brands are best, with exceptions, the U.S. brands are significantly lower, and the Euro-brands are slightly worse. Things change. The Korean brands were trash years ago, but they have improved quickly and it shows in the survey results. This is actually a very nice little check on CR's survey methodology as it shows that it can show changes as a manufacturer starts to make significant efforts to improve reliability. Again, the J.D. power numbers are showing the same thing.

In the end, you can come up with theoretical reasons why the CR (and other surveys) MAY not be valid, but in the end the reality is that they just are because the potential problems just do not materialize and people cooperate...in their own best interest.

Reply to
GRL

When it comes to polling, sample selection is crucial. Ask President Dewey.

I don't know if CU selects or weights the responses they receive, but I suspect they just use them raw. The Annual Questionnaire is sent only to CR subscribers, and last year only one-fifth of the recipients participated. Did those respondents represent a statistically valid sample of all car buyers? I doubt it. It's in who _answers_ and how, more than in who _asks_ and how, that bias can creep in. (And by "bias" I don't mean a deliberate thumb on the scale but something that's invisible to the person who has it.)

A respondent to CR's questionnaire is more likely to have followed CR's advice and to share CR's biases, political and otherwise, than the typical car buyer. Yes, he will tend to defend his car-buying decision, whatever it was; but he may also tend to justify his decision to subscribe to CR by echoing its recommendations. If he bought Japanese and was pleased, he's more likely to answer; it he bought American and had trouble, he's also more likely to answer. Does CR correct for this when they calculate reliability ratings? I doubt it. For one thing, they're hard (impossible?) to quantify.

And reliability ratings are entirely quantitative. Sell enough of something, and somebody is bound to have trouble with it. The question is what percentage of all buyers of the product had problems. To get a good answer to that, it's not so good to rely on self-selected samples, even if they are collected by a _financially_ unbiased entity.

Reply to
Neill Massello

OK so I probably didn't use the correct statistical term. Thanks for the clarification. However, what I said about having to know what the total number of a vehicle model owners were who were surveyed is, is absolutely true. It is probably some other statistical term but I'm too lazy to look it up. Logically I already proved why this crunching needs to be done, and you simply reaffirmed this in the rest of this paragraph - without of course actually adressing the fact that CR cannot do this crunching to their survey results since they do not poll the nonrespondents by phone to followup.

comparing raw numbers is ALL that CR can do since their polling is self-selecting.

As I already said before, this is a moot issue if every polled person reponds. You are assuming they are, because you do. This means you are assuming the CR results are right, you do not KNOW they are right. And that is what we have been trying to hammer into your head - that the results are not anything other than an opinion that you can make assumptions on, not facts. The fact that they are an opinion formed as a result of a badly taken poll does NOT give them credibility, you are arguing that it does.

That's not true with surveys. A professional survey firm deals with people who do not want to respond prety simply - they substitute another person out of the same population strata.

All a survey is, is an attempt to get a result for the entire population of a given group by taking a sample. As long as the sample is representative of the entire population you are fine. If a single person in that sample refuses to respond, you can substitute someone else who will respond as long as that person is also randomly selected from the same population group. The only time this wouldn't work is if the survey question was a metaquestion, such as "please tell us if you respond to surveys that ask your opinion or not" or "out of any given survey what percentage of people will refuse to respond" or some such.

They do change but the US brands never are on top in the CR articles, that fact does not change. And even more importantly, when has a CR editor or reviewer ever said that the so-called survey results are trash on a particualar model? For example when has an editor ever decided to actually check up on the results? Has a CR editor ever said "gee, the survey respondents all said that the RH door handle breaks off on the KIA 7765, I test drove that car the other day and I can't see how that could happen, this is an unusual analomy, I wonder if something changed suddenly that our survey missed?" The CR people are -NEVER- critical of their surveys. Even the best surveys in the world, done by the most respected survey organizations in the world, have critics who have found weak spots. But not the CR surveys! From the way they talk about their surveys, you would think that CR would have hundreds of survey firms begging them to give seminars and such on how to take surveys.

Not true. Every time someone says this I go to the JD Powers website and I start making comparisons between specific models of what CR says and what JD Powers says and many times they are different.

No the reality is that YOU BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE based on your experiences, (which is fine) and your making an assumption that your positive experiences with CR's surveys reflect everyone elses' experience with CRs surveys. (which is false)

Where you are going wrong is that you are not realizing that your making the assumption.

What I am saying is that many people have posted that they have found the CR surveys to be false - and if it was true that CR surveys were "always right" then all those people are either liars or were faked up. I think that is much less likely that all those people were liars or faked, than that the idea that the CR surveys are accurate.

Ted

normalization

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

I do NOT assume every polled person responds. That would be so far outside the realm of human nature that you could only expect that response in a Communist country's election (they normally had 100% turnout, officially).

Nope I assume the response rate is well under 100%. But I do still think the response is representative of the whole CR readership population and that they represent the population as a whole - or close enough for the results to be valid. Note that in their latest survey they got responses on over a million vehicles. If we assume two vehicles per respondent, that is still over a half-million responses. Big number.

I disagree with your example of a "random" survey where some of the sample set refuses to reply and they pick another member as a replacement. That still means that the responses are self-selected since any participant can choose not to respond, just like the CR survey. Get this, in the case of the CR survey, the original sample set is THE ENTIRE CR readership. That would be the ideal that any representative survey tries to match the results of. The sample set then self-selects itself down to whoever actually responds. The same thing happens with your targeted survey except that they start out with the assumption that the entire population cannot be polled, so they select a sub-set that THEY HOPE is representative of the whole and parts of it can/will still self-select out. In either case you run the risk the erroneous results. However, at least in the case of the CR survey, the results they get can be looked at as a long term, multi-year set and you know what, they hold together pretty darn well. There is noise in the data in terms of anomalous results for a given year (some response facet gets really good/bad for just a single year), but you expect fine detail errors that in an imperfect survey.

Want another little data point? If the CR results were really very off, you can bet that a brand that thought they had been horribly mis-judged would make a HUGE stink about it because CR survey results are closely watched by the car manufacturers because many of their potential customers refer to them when buying. CR (and other polling organizations) have been recently raking MB over the coals for poor quality. Dieter Zetsche, the fellow who ran Chrysler has recently been promoted CEO and to running MB as well and one of his stated objectives (as reported in the car buff books) is to get MB quality back up to where it was long ago. Now one can be sarcastic and say that he has been mislead by the erroneous results presented by CR in their surveys (and other polling organizations that show the same results) and he is going to waste money fixing something that is not broken. What a chump, huh?

see:

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Q: How much have recent quality problems hurt the image of Mercedes-Benz?

DZ: "A brand is like a savings account. For most of the past 100 years, Mercedes has paid into this account and built its brand equity. We have withdrawn from that account in recent years. But it is still a strong account and we certainly intend to build it up again in the future.

Yes, there were issues. But I am very grateful for what my predecessors have achieved in improving quality in the past few years. We have made big strides, and our internal measurements show our quality now is the best it's ever been. Clearly we need to prove this to customers. We have to make these quality improvements sustainable and without exception so that every single car we offer to our customers proves we are back on top."

or:

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"Anne Stevens, Ford's chief operating officer for the Americas, said she was pleased that the automaker had maintained its place among the domestics in durability, but was unhappy that Ford had not won any top picks. She said the magazine's findings on the quality gap between Ford and its Asian competitors were somewhat more pessimistic than Ford's own research.

"Do we recognize there still is a gap? Yes," she said. "But we also recognize from our survey data that the domestics, and Ford in particular, are closing the gaps with the Asians."

GM spokeswoman Janine Fruehan said Chevrolet's quality rankings were hurt by the launch of some older models, which are still counted in the averages for the brand.

She said by GM's internal measures, "we are showing ongoing and consistent signs of improvement in initial quality, long-term quality and perceptual quality."

Doing statistics with inanimate objects is extremely easy compared with doing it with people and you can get led astray easily, no question. (Remember New Coke? Think Coke polled - what they thought were representative - focus groups selected by statisticians on New Coke for taste testing before they launched it? Think it succeeded?)

You don't want to believe the validity of what CR gets because the methodology is not perfect, that's fine. Want to doubt the J.D. Power survey results that say the same thing. That's OK, too. Reality is reality whether one chooses to acknowledge it or not. And the car manufacturers, even the ones that don't do well, believe CR, too. They can't afford to self-delude. You can.

Good day to you.

Reply to
GRL

Why worry about it? It's not like being a "tree hugger" is a bad thing. Anybody who's concerned about humanity past his next paycheck should be able to figure that out.

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Reply to
dh

Japanes cars are overated, my brothers wife has a 2000 Mazda cant rember the model, the one at the top of the line before making the Millinium. The car has maybe a little over 110k miles on it and has been thru 2 transmissions. It rides like a truck with rattles all over the place. It is there second Mazda the first one didnt last either but she still wanted another one...just goes to show how people get brainwashed.

Reply to
smitty

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