CR is very methodical, has plenty of qualified technical people, checks everybody's work by comittee after comittee, and overall they seem to make fewer mistakes than most reviewers, such as those publications that name cars of the year. CR's taste tests are another matter, and their judgments are often outright wierd (awful for pancake mix, good for coffee), and nobody should pay too much attention to their overall scores over their individual ratings (i.e., vacuum cleaners they judged best at cleaning scored worse than some others that were better in some unimportant aspects).