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So what is right for one person is all wrong for someone else, and why everyone will never agree on CR or any other reviewer!
Actually we're in pretty deep as it is (hint - you may find some more good arguments there to use in here, LOL).
Steve
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SUVs, Vans and Aftermarket & Accessories Message Boards
If we had known this would draw you in, we'd have brought up the subject long ago!
You do make an interesting point and that gets to the essence of "quality" (remember Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?)
The pragmatic corporate view of "quality" is "conforming to customer requirements" which, in essence, relies on the tangibles or measurables. It does leave a bit to be desired.
Glad to have you aboard.
tidester
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SUVs; Aftermarket & Accessories
And yes, I think a survey of owners with a decent sample size is vastly more useful than individual reports from enthusiasts for a particular make or model. You automatically assume that CR readers have a bias against certain makes and models... if this is true, why did they bother to buy that make and model?
The question of "feel" is what I mean by relevance in their testing. Some people want a car that is roomy and reliable. For them CR is a great source of info. Some people want a car with neck-jerking acceleration, and for them CR is a bad source of info. Does the fact that CR reviews focus on quantifiable things make them biased? I don't think so. Of course the guy who buys the car with the 6 second 0-60 time will lambast CR, just as the guy who buys the car with the stellar reliability record will praise them.
I'd love to see some other source of this kind of info. But as was mentioned above, automakers will never do it (at least not voluntarily). Maybe what we need is some sort of consumer protection law that requires automakers to report the reliability history of their products year-to-year, so that consumers can be protected from buying lemons. They track this data internally already. I'd certainly vote it should be shared with the public just like MPG ratings and crash test scores.
It's sheer fantasy to believe that Consumer Reports is somehow not capable of "biting the hand that feeds it", unlike other organizations.
Effectively, they use the same business model for funding as PBS television -- e.g., when Mobil Oil buys "public service announcements" instead of advertising. The difference is that consumers are made aware of these connections on PBS whenever they view a PSA, while Consumer Reports has made part of its tagline "unbiased reviews", consistently selling the "no advertising dollars" bit, while taking big money from key influencers.
Does anyone have an older copy of CR with original reviews of Firestone tires? Are they consistent with the safety problems that later emerged, or not? I'd be willing to bet that CR recommended them, and then had to jump on the "outraged" bandwagon to cover their own hindquarters. Meanwhile, haven't they been a staunch supporter of Ford through that controversy? How did they review the pertinent Explorers? And, how many magazines have they sold because of the controversy?
It will be interesting to see what happens in the legal proceedings of Suzuki against CR. Apparently, CR intends to use the fifth amendment (freedom to express their *opinion*, not just fact) as their main defense since Suzuki has managed to blow holes in their "systematic" testing methodology.
http://www.rcfp.org/news/2002/0627suzuki.html
Assoc. Press, June 25, 2002: "The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency declined to declare the vehicle defective and said the magazine's test procedures for the Suzuki "do not have a scientific basis," Circuit Judge A. Wallace Tashima wrote. Tashima also said a federal jury should consider whether the magazine's motives were profit-driven, given that it reprinted its original 1988 story in fund-raising solicitations while it was in "substantial debt."
Oh, by the way, my latest vehicle hasn't been reviewed by CR, and my older second car was purchased without checking CR -- it now has over 250,000 miles on it and is still running okay. In fact, my main resource has been the opinion of owners and independant mechanics, and guides like Edmunds.
Having just spent part of Friday visting with the Forester, the Vue and the Escape, it was great to find a board exactly on the subject.
There is something about the human brain that if you 'expect' to see a certain result, you will. Take for example some of the gimick products that claim to increase a vehicles MPG. It turns out that most really don't, however because the driver 'wants' to see an increase, they unknowingly alter their driving habits (being lighter on the gas pedal etc), which does indeed produce an MPG gain..
I think similar psychology is in play if you buy a certain brand of vehicle with the 'expectation' that it will have higher reliability than all the others. How does that person fill out the survey?
I have no idea how much this skews the numbers but I do believe it has some affect..
"Maybe what we need is some sort of consumer protection law that requires automakers to report the reliability history of their products year-to-year, so that consumers can be protected from buying lemons. "
How would the 'reliability history' as you put it 'protect customers'? Would you recommend that if you bought a vehicle that was rated 'lower' then you knowingly bought a substandard vehicle, so its your fault for not listening to the govt?
Most states (if not all) already have lemon law's in place that protect the customer. These are effective.
The type of law your proposing is not implementable, would not offer any more or less protection that current laws, and would probably just encourage the manufactures to tell you 'thats not a problem' in order to keep that number low..
Not implementable: what would you count as a problem? Only problems covered under warranty? If you try to count more than that, what about problems that independant garages fix, do they have to now report all of their fixes to the manufacturer?
As in most cases (in my opinion), more laws are a bad idea.. Take advantage or enforce the ones we already have.
I haven't read about what defense they intend to use but you're probably thinking of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution (freedom of press/speech). The fifth has to do with warrants and self-incrimination.
tidester
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SUVs; Aftermarket & Accessories
Am I in the wrong forum?
It is. We seem to have gotten off on a bit of a tangent discussing published evaluations of compact SUVs. This is the nature of message boards!
tidester
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SUVs; Aftermarket & Accessories
I've been doing the same thing and debating all of them. I know I have extreme requirements for my commute, so I'm really interested in what others think about this group (since my next vehicle will more than likely be from this batch, unless it is a different Subaru).
mtngal: I've recently tested everthing on this board except the Vue, plus a few others. I liked them all for different reasons. I was sorely tempted by the '03 Forester, since it seemed to offer the best all-around performance, decent ground clearance, good mileage, comfortable interior for humans and pets, etc. I compromised its strengths in favor of the Liberty's solely based on towing capacity, and low gears for rough (uninhabited and unpredictable, not necessarily extreme) terrain. I was impressed by Hyundai's customer focused, "can do" attitude, but felt the Santa Fe was not going to handle anything resembling off road as well as the others. Also, their dealer network is not as strong in some parts of the country, and I travel frequently. If the '03s were available, I may have reconsidered the Escape -- good power, but it otherwise just didn't grab me. If I had a Wrangler as a second vehicle, I most likely would have chosen the Subaru.
I may not buy a best buy but I wont buy a problem area car or appliance.
I try not to get into a "WARGAMES" mentality. If you crawl out of the bunker and see the sun shining and the birds singing when the computer has been overwhelmed with chaos maybe a reality check is in order.
For me the reality check with cars is workaday chit chat comparisons and a call to my insurance company for rate comparisons. Typically they coincide with CR evaluations. Beyond that what else is there?
I do drive a "car based" mini-ute and it does just fine on any logging road/access road to reach my favorite fishing/hiking spots in the Cascade range of Oregon. Granted the Liberty/Xterra have the advantage of solid axles and stronger frames. But, you really need to ask yourself. How severe am I going to "offroad". The facts show over 90 percent of 4x4 vehicles barely even see a gravel road and most of them purchased are for pure looks/image. I guess one needs to ask themselves. How severe am I going to offroad? Would I take a 23K vehicle into these places? How often? ect...
-mike
-mike
How about a test drive or two? You might want to try deciding for yourself, you'll have more fun that way.
If two vehicles are being compared and one gets 5000 responses while the other only gets a little more than the required 100 (which is rather low by the way) you're going to have a mismatch one way or the other. Listing a "margin of error" would help too.
As far as vehicles that can handle graded forest service roads - my first car did very well on them. It was a '69 Opel Kadet. So for that type of stuff 4WD is over-rated - anything with decent ground clearance will work. If it is steep, it helps to have weight over the drive wheels - pickups (like a 2WD Taco) are too light if empty. The Taco is poor even with a fiberglass shell on it!
I think that by actually going and driving these things you'll find what you're really looking for, whether it be an on or off-road vehicle, what kind of handling you like, etc.
For the record, I don't trust CR and having a bit of a statistical background myself, you must have an unbiased sample size large enough to make any survey valid. If it's not there in the beginning, no numbers generated can be realistically used or trusted.
Regardless, if even as much as 99% of a driver's time is spent in easily managed conditions, but that 1% means getting stuck or turning back from a destination, who wouldn't want the option to persevere? The "percentage of use" argument against SUVs isn't any more persuasive or dissuasive than the logic behind purchasing a high-performance sedan or coupe for a high-traffic (i.e., relatively low speed) area. Where are these "street racers" going to go? This is just another area where "want" often wins over "need" (significant criteria not even on CR's view screen).
I couldn't agree more...
Bob
I hope I am sensible enough to buy one of these vehicles or a WRX. What I really need is to be able to get through the occasional winter roadblocks without having to put on chains. Around my home they require either 4x4 or chains when the roads get bad, and I don't like chains and snow shovels at 4am.
It's much harder to have a large sample of, say, Vipers, because there aren't that many on the road. So they do what you'd expect them to do - state that the sample was too small.
They can't forecast a margin of error, because cars purchased in the future may be different, so they can only forecast reliability. This is scape's argument, that the Escape has improved, and the data will not reflect that until a year or two from now. I'm not saying I agree, but it'll sure be interesting to see if it improves at all.
And they rate the PT Cruiser with a big red dot, and the VW New Beetle with a big black one, so I don't agree with the bias towards imports.
It cracks me up when a person owns one car that does not match their forecasts and uses that to say they are wrong. One car is not a significant sample. All the cars you own in a lifetime probably aren't.
The surveys are filled out by subscribers, but those people that own Jeep Grand Cherokees and rate them poorly are supposed to be biased against the truck they bought? I don't agree with that logic.
They are gathering data and basically publish it for you to interpret. You may not agree with their opinions, but there is plenty of fact for you to draw your own conclusions from.
Another point - maybe reliability isn't a top criteria for you. Heck, maybe you love your dealer. Say you own a Jag X-Type and get free service, free coffee and red carpet treatment, would it be so horrible to have to go there maybe one more visit per year to have something fixed for free? That might not bother some folks.
-juice
If that's the case, their "scientific" results are each based on a sample size of one. Combining that with a returned batch of subscribers' opinons isn't what I'd call "statisticaly significant findings" by any stretch.
I agree with you that it's helpful for shoppers to review their findings, but Consumer Reports should be forced to remove "unbiased" from their tagline. (If you haven't already, check out the link from my previous post #2607 -- good for a chuckle, if nothing more.)
If the average user wants to research a car for reliability, history and predictable future repairs what alternatives are there to CR?
-mike
100 is their minimum on returned surveys. That would be a good sample size for, and I'll use your example, the Viper but not for the F150. That USA Today article showed us that they didn't even get enough responses to publish data for the Grand Am which is a pretty strong seller from year to year. One thing that shows me is that people are not taking these surveys seriously and/or not taking the time to fill them out correctly.
You did make some other good points up there though.
"If the average user wants to research a car for reliability, history and predictable future repairs what alternatives are there to CR?"
It's true that I don't like CR, period. But they probably are the best source for this type of data out there right now.
You asked what else there was, besides CR, to help one choose a vehicle and I was just commenting on that.
It's not too hard to organize, you should set one up in your area! Heck in the NE corridor it is very hard to find off-road trails, unlike in the West.
Hopefully we'll see some Santa Fes, Escapes or Vues out there this time. Usually we get Mitsus, Isuzus, and Subies.
-mike
For one, if someone is personally invested in feeling good about an ultimately bad choice, or if they are more interested in supporting a presumed or established consensus of peers than otherwise (the ever powerful desire for approval), they will be unlikely to share (respectively) negative or contradictory feedback. Perhaps you've all read about a psychological phenomenon called "cognitive dissonance" -- a big factor in bias.
On the other hand, if someone is satisfied with a choice -- maybe even ecstatic about it -- they are less likely to share their experience than someone who has a negative experience (call it social Darwinism, but humans are generally more motivated to learn how to better "survive" the prospect of another error than to share information about how to "win").
And then, there's just plain busy-ness and laziness -- how often have any of us not bothered to take or return a survey related to our own experience?
That's partly where the randomness and bias come in. If reliability data is based upon relatively small samples and/or randomly returned surveys, the results are "biased", "not generalizable" and "statistically invalid" by definition. (Ask anyone who develops truly scientific assessments.)
For many, many reasons, Consumer Reports is not any better than information available from Edmunds, Carpoint, Consumer Guide (not affilated with CR), Cars.com, or a vast array of alternatives, including other forums like this. In fact, resources like Edmunds (my favorite) are better than CR in that you get to read directly from contributors and decide their bias, rather than having it masked by "scientific" censors.
One thing that's intriguing to me with regard to Consumer Reports is their "not for profit" business status. Do we trust them more simply because they resemble a charity?
For testing, they use one, but it's fair to expect two identical cars to perform similarly. If not, that manufacturer has a serious quality problem, not CR! ;-)
CR has a different perspective than most mags (non-enthusiast, consumer oriented), but I find they are more consistent and complete than, say, Car & Driver or Autoweek. Who else tells you whether a car has a donut or a full size spare, the type of hinges on the trunk, the payload, the tow ratings, the number and type of seatbelts and whether they are adjustable, the presence or lack of LATCH mechnisms, summaries of crash test and bumper basher results, etc?
I like C&D and Autoweek, but they serve a totally different purpose IMO.
I'm not saying it's flawless, just that it remains useful.
-juice
http://www.autonet.ca/AutonetStories/stories.cfm?storyID=6526
Their V6 hasn't been making 181hp all along, in fact the real output is 173hp. No wonder the Forester outruns it, that's just +8hp with a lot more weight to pull.
At least they're talking about offering longer warranties in some cases.
The 4 cylinder Santa Fe makes 11 hp less than stated, or 138 instead of the previously stated 149.
-juice
On topic: Very interesting situation for Hyundai. Were the erroneous materials only distributed in the Canadian market? (www.hyundaiupdate.ca indicates that is the case) They seem to be handling the issue very proactively.
But for most of the car mags, unless it goes 0-60 in 2.6 seconds, it is pointless to own. For consumer mags, how many airbags it has and how well the child seats attach are the only real priorities.
If you want to research SUVs for actual offroading, you need to look at offroading mags, or 4x4 mags.
I have been pretty satisfied with my 4Runner for offroading - I have never gotten stuck, and have been through some pretty rugged terrain (haven't attempted the Rubicon yet though!). OTOH, it is slower than heck for town driving, particularly freeway, and I have to go slow around corners and stuff. Gas mileage sucks.
Gotta have the solid rear axle - I CAN'T BELIEVE Explorer went to IRS...
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
Sometimes yes, but not all the time. MT compared the Escape, CR-V and VUE a month or two ago. The CR-V (5M tranny) won most of the performance tests, but the Escape ended up winning the comparison mostly based on, according to them, it's utility factor. As we all know, these smaller SUV's are built for utility and not off-roading so it seems that MT was looking for the right thing in that one.
-mike
-ss4
davegh,
Obviously you thought the CR-V had better utility because you bought one. MT's opinion was that the Escape was better. They are no different from any other publication in that they only offer their opinions. You have to decide the rest with or without their help.
There are no trophies for which vehicle wins the most comparisons.
Escape 6-3500 lbs
Vue 6-2500 lbs
CR-V-1500lbs
For some, not all, this defines utility.
CRV: Picnic table
Escape: NO picnic table!
Lol!