[marksvolt]

The October, 2012 CR Reliability chart is attached as a PDF.

Meaningful? Meaningless? That's up to you.

They mention the Volt several times:

The General Motors nameplates—Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC—moved up in ranking. Cadillac climbed the farthest, but the best news might be from Chevrolet. The Volt extended-range electric car continues to have above-average reliability, and the compact Chevrolet Cruze, dismal in its first year, improved to average.

When the Prius came to market 12 years ago, there was plenty of skepticism about how well hybrid powertrains would hold up. But those fears were unfounded: Reliability is a high point for most hybrids. All but the relatively new Hyundai Sonata Hybrid proved reliable in this year’s survey.

So far, electric vehicles have also been reliable. The Nissan Leaf had an excellent showing and was the most reliable Nissan in the lineup. The Chevrolet Volt has been above average in our past two surveys. And Toyota’s new Prius Plug-in earned a top reliability score in this year’s survey.

But despite the quotes above and the fact that the Volt has the highest rating of ANY vehicle in the CR survey of "Would you definitely buy this car again?"- 92% - it is still only middling on the CR Overall Ratings of small cars (behind the Leaf, Prius and VW Golf TDI).

 

[marksvolt]

Yeah- VERY fancy math. We may have to publish reliability ratings for CR's math.

Here is the fine print for the chart:

This graph shows how the brands rank on the average of their models' predicted reliability scores. The score is calculated as a percentage better or worse than the average of all cars. Each bar shows the range between a brand's best and worst models. The rank change shows how many spots a brand rose or fell in the standings compared with last year's survey. We needed sufficient data on at least two models to include a brand. Ram (formerly Dodge trucks) was not separated out from Dodge last year. "-" indicates no change from last year. *Based on one model year only.