The CR surveys have become meaningless. The differences between the car makers are too small for accurate measurement and the respondents seem to just parrot what CR has told them in the first place, making it something of an echo chamber. What they ding you for is also open to debate. Ford has gotten killed because of MyTouch, but MyTouch is just an interface that people will adapt to. Once they do that it will be "intuitive".
Just to expand on the first point, magazines and journalists always want to report with levels of certainty that the data simply doesn't support. It's like the political polls. Twenty polls show one candidate with a 2% or 3% lead, and then there is one poll that shows a tie with an error band of +/- 3%. That's pretty much what you'd expect if one candidate had a lead of a few points, which means all the poll is doing is mapping a dead fish. However, you don't get people's attention with that, so what gets reported is that the race is moving in some direction or another. Same thing here. Honest reporting would say: "90% of the companies have similar products within our margin of error" but what you hear is "X company has fallen from #3 to #9 in reliability". Please.
Just to expand on the first point, magazines and journalists always want to report with levels of certainty that the data simply doesn't support. It's like the political polls. Twenty polls show one candidate with a 2% or 3% lead, and then there is one poll that shows a tie with an error band of +/- 3%. That's pretty much what you'd expect if one candidate had a lead of a few points, which means all the poll is doing is mapping a dead fish. However, you don't get people's attention with that, so what gets reported is that the race is moving in some direction or another. Same thing here. Honest reporting would say: "90% of the companies have similar products within our margin of error" but what you hear is "X company has fallen from #3 to #9 in reliability". Please.
