Why Do You Believe Consumer Reports?

Technical NightOwl ^ | April 6th, 2011 | Gene Steinberg

[antiRepublicrat]

both are currently accessible using PlayOn thanks to another feature iOS doesn’t support - Flash.

I'd love to see how long you can watch a movie that way.

[Terpfen]

As far as the all cel phones do this argument - the answer is no they don’t.

Sigh. Yes, they do. Stop spreading bullsh!t. You look like an idiot.

[truth_seeker]

“Not even Mercedes can crack their top 10.”

And they usually rate BMW highly.

My personal experience tracked CR exactly for Mercedes, with an extremely unreliable ML20.

[ReignOfError]

1. This has been going on for at least two years, so it must be a mixture of old and new iPhones. To be honest, neither of us could tell an old iPhone from a new iPhone.

The old iPhones don't have a "little gap on the edge of the phone" that will cause calls to drop. The antenna is inside the phone, behind the plastic back. If this has been going on for longer than two years, it is some other issue that I have never seen reported by anyone else.

2. All of the service would have been on AT&T, which is really crappy in San Antonio

My best guess is that there were a lot of dropped calls because the coverage sucked, and the mythical little gap became a folkloric explanation. Data is not the plural of anecdote.

As far as the all cel phones do this argument - the answer is no they don't.

All cell phones exhibit signal attenuation if you cover the antenna. If the phone is brick-like, you're less likely to see it because your hand simply can't get close to the antenna. On any phone, including the iPhone, the signal attenuation is only noticeable, only results in dropped calls or slow data transfers, if the signal was already marginal.

[truthguy]

Trouble is, very few car review sources take reliability into account other than Consumer Reports.

Yeah, they have something called "predicted reliability". What a FN joke. US cars have been every bit as reliable as imports over the past 10 years or so. Before that maybe not so much. My Dodge Dakota 2001 has 140K miles with no problems. Great reliability.

CRs methodology is crap, plain and simple. There ratings are so different in every category than Motor Trend, Car and Driver, Road and Track, and a bunch of others. Explain to me how and why CR is so different. How can the Japanese have just about every place in the top 10 in every category? Impossible. CR is a shill for them. That's why. Plus CR simply doesn't factor safety into their ratings. US cars are the best for safety except for the very expensive European cars, but they get no credit for this from CR.

Everyone in the auto industry knows about how horrible CR is. They should stick to Refrigerators, Toasters, and the like. But they probably suck at that as well.

[truthguy]

I could post 50 articles like this about CR if I wanted, but here's a good one.

Don't trust CR

[truthguy]

I could post 50 articles like this about CR if I wanted, but here's a good one.

Don't trust CR

[jjotto]

Not just CR, but almost all car reviewers purposely obscure real safety data, comparing cars to other similar cars instead of to real-life situations.

If CR seems to shill for the Japanese, it sure seems like Motor Trend shills for General Motors. CR lately seems to favor Fords! Probably it reflects the biases of individuals hired rather than editorially.

CR does indeed admit that most cars are very reliable compared to 20 years ago and notes that buyers know this too.

My wish is that Car&Driver, a mag that I trust, would include reliability info in their reviews. The vaunted BWM 7-Series, for example, is a work of art, but the few folks I know who own them are furious at the frequency and expense of unexpected problems. Prospective buyers would want to know that.