On Sun, 23 Oct 2005, larry moe 'n curly wrote:

>> Your argument here amounts to "OK, CR might be full of ****, but what
>> choice do we have but to believe them?".
>
> That's a ridiculous summation

Only for those who blindly believe in the Gospel According to Consumer
Reports. You apparently fit in that category.

> and what does the version of the transmission in each model year when CR
> is reporting the reliabily model year by model year?

Would you like to try that again, this time with a complete, parsable
sentence?

> Also if CR's reliability surveys are so useless, why do they strangely
> correlate with the results of two other surveys?

Whether they do or not depends on your own biases -- and how much you know
about how the magazine business works.

> But tell me: How is the average consumer supposed to judge the
> reliability of new cars using just his or her brain and five senses?

Well, for starters, turn off the television set...

> initial quality and long term reliability are only loosely related (as
> so many British luxury cars have shown).

Quite true.