Honda cleans up in Consumer Reports picks

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http://www.cnn.com/2006/AUTOS/carreviews/03/01/cr_top_picks/index.html

Honda cleans up in Consumer Reports picks

All 10 of the magazine's 2006 Top Picks are Japanese nameplates, but half are U.S.-made Hondas.

March 2, 2006; Posted: 9:26 a.m. EST (1426 GMT)

By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNNMoney staff writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Japanese carmakers -- or, more specifically, Honda followed by Toyota and Subaru -- took all ten spots in this year's Consumer Reports magazine top picks.

No American or European nameplates are represented in this year's list, which is published in the April issue of Consumer Reports magazine.

The lone American model on last year's list, the Ford Focus, was replaced this year by the new, redesigned Honda Civic

Of the five Honda vehicles on Consumer Reports' Top Picks, four are manufactured in the U.S. The remaining vehicle, the Honda Ridgeline, was designed and engineered in the U.S. but is built in Canada.

Of the five other vehicles in the list, two are Toyotas, two are Subarus and one is from Nissan's Infiniti luxury division. Those remaining five are all are produced in Japan.

Consumer Reports buys vehicles anonymously for its test fleet through ordinary retail dealerships and tests them at a specially built facility in Connecticut. Among the tests performed are acceleration, handling, braking, ride quality and visibility.

In addition to track tests, test engineers also drive the vehicles in ordinary day-to-day situations.

To gauge reliability, the magazine surveys subscribers to both the magazine and its related Web site. Each respondent can supply data on up to two vehicles and the magazine received survey data on about a million individual vehicles this year, Consumer Reports said.

In order to be considered for a Top Pick a vehicle must have at least average predicted reliability, based on survey results, and good scores in crash tests by the government and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
 
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To gauge reliability, the magazine surveys subscribers to both the magazine and its related Web site. Each respondent can supply data on up to two vehicles and the magazine received survey data on about a million individual vehicles this year, Consumer Reports said.
I don't have a problem with the Honda ranking, I just have a problem with CR and their methods. I have ranted about this before, so I'll be brief. Their reliability study is NOT a random sample, because it is only subscribers, and as such, that significantly narrows the values, income and ideals of the study group, and therefore skews the results.

It's kinda like asking a 500 "Born Again" WASPs (White Anglosaxon Protestants) their opinions on religion - you pretty much know what the general answer is going to be before you ask the question. Why doesn't CR release the DEMOGRAPHIC data of the study group with their studies???

CR needs to do truly random samples of the general population (like JD Powers, etc.) before I put much faith in their reports.

Stepping off the soapbox.....
 

epj3

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I'm looking for bmw046series' insightful thoughts on this.

Kirby has an excellent point, and again the whole "reliability" thing is also an innacurate way to compare totally different classes of cars. A person with a $20,000 Pontiac solstice will deal with a few rattles and little stuff that breaks as they almost expect those problems. If their radio display is messed up every other time they turn the car on for 5 minutes but then is fine after that (as our past 3 pontiacs have been), they ignore it and just deal with it. A person who buys a $45k+ Z4 will be picky as hell. I would!
 


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