[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.

[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.