Consumer Reports Cheats on Car Awards

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 27, 6:49AM EST

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The Consumer Reports ratings of cars and light trucks gets almost as much publicity as those from J.D. Power. The nonprofit has announced its best and worst cars for 2013. The most notable result of the report was that no U.S. vehicles made the list. But there are reasons for that, and the absence of other car brands, which Consumer Reports buried in the fine print.

The first major point the research operation made what that:

The top seven brands are Japanese, with Toyota accounting for three and Honda, two. Most Detroit brands fall toward the bottom, with several marred by subpar reliability. European brands usually score in between, with cars that are comfortable and enjoyable to drive but usually offer only average or worse reliability. Audi is the notable exception this year.

That tells only part of the story:

To be included, each brand needs at least three models for which we have test and reliability data. That’s why we didn’t include Fiat, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Porsche, Ram, or Smart: Each had too few models for which we had adequate reliability data. Several sell fewer than three models.

And:

No pickup was chosen because GM’s and Chrysler’s full-sized models have been revamped and we haven’t yet tested them.

Those caveats mean that a reasonably decent portion of the universe of vehicles that might have been tested were not. For the overall report to be conclusive, that level of exclusions is unacceptable.

Consumer Reports bragged about its own prowess as an evaluator of vehicles sold in the United States:

Our Top Picks are as close as it gets to “no-brainers” in the auto market. They’re impressive all-around vehicles, chosen from more than 280 we’ve recently tested, that have excelled in our testing, are reliable, and have performed well in independent crash tests. What’s not to like?

What’s not to like is that the playing field is tilted, and the analysis has too many exceptions.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.