01-12-2009, 09:59 PM
billb wrote:
That's "real life" data. Consumer report Readers data.
That's data CR collected.
All that means is Consumer Reports has a readership that apparently favors those autos. No kidding.
No, it doesn't mean that at all. The CR surveys are very objective. They ask about each car or major appliance you have owned since new and then have very specific questionaires regarding which systems required repairs on those cars. There is no "Do you like your Toyota" subjective questions. It is irrelevant what the readership owns since it is the repair rates on individual parts of individual cars that are summed up to get a reliability estimate. I think CR does a crappy job on a lot of things (by often measuring irrelevant aspects of a product's performance while ignoring critical aspects, but for cars I don't think there's really any way to beat their methodology.