I once subscribed to Consumer Reports, but no longer do, because I consider them to be too profoundly wrong too much of the time -- or perhaps I don't fit their profile of a consumer, so their highly rated products don't work for me.
Their most hilarious rating efforts were with early home computers -- they ALWAYS recommended the previous model, because it was cheaper with proven reliabiity, and surely 16 kilobytes of RAM was enough for any sane person for the foreseeable future...They always recommended non-standard software because it was cheaper and worked just as well, and because apparently nobody had informed them about that whole compatability thing...
I recently picked up a copy of their annual Cars issue ('07 cars) in which they have really nice things to say about the Porsche 911: fun to drive, excellent agility, good acceleration, easy to live with, fantastic brakes, ride is relatively supple, good visibility...radio controls are complicated and rear seats are only for children. (Duh.) Can't recommend it though (give it a full black circle) because of reliability issues.
I would suggest to them that the reason the Porsche and the Corvette and other similar cars always have bad reliability is because they are driven somewhat harder than the average Camry; if you send out a standard industry survey sheet that asks, "Did anything fall off?" the answers for a sports car are much more likely to be "yes" than for a Corolla, for reasons that have little to do with production quality.
I have to say over the years that everybody I know who is truly an expert in something, from bikes to cameras to sound systems to TVs and computers, when asked about Consumer Reports, may actually read CR for "other" products but will tell you that the ratings in THEIR specialty are way off base. I'll bet if we found a washing-machine enthusiast he'd tell you the same thing.
JC
