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.
