CR and the Avalanche
Did anyone notice what Consumer Reports (CR) picked for its best pick-up truck for 2009? Just to show how out of touch they are with reality, in their words, “And thanks to improved reliability, the Chevrolet Avalanche replaced the Chevrolet Silverado as our choice for pickups.”
The Avalanche, to the best of my determination, is a vehicle that gets truck fuel mileage without the usefulness and tries to pretend it’s a car with (again) bad fuel mileage, poor ride and handling qualities (as compared to a car) and a leaky trunk, unless you put a cap on it, which will further limit its usefulness as a truck. And they picked it instead of a Silverado because of its improved reliability which is pretty amazing due to its having the same mechanicals as the Silverado. To further confuse the issue, they recommend the Ford F-150 for those who would like a truck that is useful as a truck. Apparently not only did the Avalanche improve its reliability but the Silverado must have gone down in reliability for the Ford to sneak in there.
This all goes to prove the uselessness of CR’s reliability reporting system. People who buy weird, unusual or (back in the day) foreign vehicles will never report anything negative to CR as they feel a need to justify their inane purchases. The Avalanche and others of the same ilk beginning with the Subaru Brat of many years past, are probably something maybe five percent of the buying public has any real use for. GM just had to produce this Honda fighter to further stretch its meager resources and, like the GM built mini-Humvees, should never have been built in the first place. And yet, CR, with all its preaching about only buying good, sound, economical and, nowadays, “green” vehicles, selects this morphadite as their pick-up of the year!
And the media pundits carp about how Detroit foisted such ill-designed vehicles on the American public. Lord help us all.
I think that Chrysler explained this retarded report. They said that it’s identical to one that CR put out last fall, which means that the vehicles tested would have been bought last spring, and the vehicles would have been made last winter. So this report doesn’t include the new F150 or the new Ram, and it wouldn’t notice any gains chrysler has made in quality and reliability in the past 12-14 months.
I could be tempted to said then CR doesn’t care for the “little guy” (Chrysler) and Honda don’t have the “little guy” image anymore to me.
Just to tease the folks of CR. Buy a magazine copy of their rival Consumer Guide(CG) ;-)
Consumer Retards? Puh-leese. Their auto “reviews” are filled with more subjective agricultural commodity than a Car & Driver review. Ironic when you think about it, since CR passes itself off as an “unbiased” source of “consumer” information.
I used to believe their “reliability” crap, but years later actually subscribed – and participated in their reliability “surveys.” If you have ever seen their survey, you quickly come to realize that it is basically an opinion poll that you can’t POSSIBLY get any statistically meaningful information from. The question they ask is basically “Have you experienced any PROBLEM that YOU CONSIDER to be SERIOUS (based on cost, downtime, etc)” with respect to various categories, that in turn lump together such wide-ranging components as to make the information meaningless, even if the question was remotely objective.
Basically, this allows 2 people that have the same exact thing serviced on their vehicle to respond in directly opposite ways. Since they are so biased towards Japanese products, for example, and have berated competing American products for years, and distribute their “survey” ONLY to subscribers (who read their crap on a regular basis and presumably have their viewpoint “colored” by being “consumers” of CR), consider the following “hypothetical” scenario:
Person A has a Honda Accord and Person B a Pontiac Grand Prix. BOTH have their front brakes serviced (pads and rotors) before getting their CR “survey.” Person A, having the constantly praised Honda, considers this pads and rotors service “maintenance” since his perfect Honda obviously doesn’t have anything “wrong” with it, it is simply time to replace something designed to be periodically replaced. Person B, on the other hand, constantly assaulted with CR’s berating of his inferior vehicle that suffers from a lack of “refinement” and such other “objective” CR concerns, looks at his something-hundred dollar bill for a brake service and marks off the “problem” box on his “survey.” Not at all implausible. If they simply asked WHAT services were performed under WHAT circumstances for each survey responder and then had someone actually make an objective determination of “maintenance” items versus “problems” related to vehicle “reliability,” then they might get some semi-useful information.
Bottom line, go to MSN Autos if you want actually USEFUL reliability information; they gather data from actual repair shop records and not only give you an idea of frequency of repair, they tell you WHAT the problem items are, what SPECIFIC engines, etc. experience said problems, AND how much in parts and labor it is to fix them. What a concept!
As for Generally Mediocre, there’s a company that deserves to be liquidated. Their arrogance and their bean counted to sh!t, heavily discounted (cause they wouldn’t sell otherwise) garbage products have been the bane of the American auto industry for decades now.
I agree with you re the general uselessness of the Avalanche. But, in that it was released to the public several years before the Honda Ridgeline, I don’t see how it was meant to be a Honda fighter.