More Consumer Reports rants

Some body with big money is paying the writer of the article or the writer is an uneducated Hybrid technology boner.

 

It's due to the low relative sample of 2013 owners responding to the CR surveys.
If only 2 people respond to the survey and one of them had a mechanical issue- the car has a 50% trouble rate.
If 100 people responded and 2 had issues, the car has a 2% trouble rate.
It's all in the numbers...

How many miles did they drive and what was the outside temperature?
I can get 43 mpg in my PIP on a frigid 18 deg morning for the first few miles when the ICE automatically fires up without me calling for it. Us PIP owners in cold areas know this fact all too well.

 

If they drove 8 miles they would only get about 25 mpg if it was at 18 degrees.

 

I'm prepared to believe that no-one at CR is seriously on the take, as their entire reputation is based on this. No argument with your other possibility, though.

 

At the same time, they gave the Prius 2014 the Green Car of the Year award, based partly on reliability.

 

Can't remember ever consulting Consumer Report before making a major purchase.

 

I can't think of a reason the 2013 would be different, and even if it was, you'd be under warranty on it.

 

I tend to think NY Rob has the most likely explanation; lack of sufficient sample size. Since CR makes heavy use of statistics, I would have thought they would be experts in this area and only report their findings given appropriate sample sizes though.

Regarding the low MPG figures... I have always imagined they do their efficiency tests by hiring a Formula 1 driver to race it to the top of Pikes Peak as quickly as possible. I'd never be able to get as poor economy as they list for any vehicle unless it had a fuel leak. Disregard any figure they post regarding fuel economy, but use their comments as a relative measure against other cars they have tested (raced?).

 

FWIW- it was 16f here this morning- my first five miles in EV mode got me 43mpg.
By the time I got to work (total 28 mile drive) I was up to 66mpg.

Just saying....

 

10 degrees here my 93 miles drive to my shore house, on the Garden State Parkway at 65-68 mph on CC in all HV, got me 53 MPG

 

Consumer Reports, is that something new?

 

Who reads Consumer Reports? They got the "C" wrong, and now the PIP! I would never place much weight on their survey, something does not add up with them.

 

CR states the their number one choice Tesla S (2013) is a used car to avoid. LOL

 

Tesla owners love their cars, so if one is for sale, it may well be problematic. As for CR, I consult them before the car magazines, which are even less objective, and have a proven track record (so to speak) of picking Losers. There should be a concerted effort to get CR to reveal (and then revise) their testing methodology and statistical analysis.

 

I sent this to the Consumer Reports editor.

In the issue on autos you state that when operating the Prius Plug-in in the full EV mode you found that it often "fell" out of the EV mode when accelerating. Yes, I have had the problem as well. I've owned my Prius Plug-in for almost exactly a year and driven it over 8500 miles. About 3500 of those miles were in the full EV mode. The car fell out of the EV mode exactly twice. That is just terrible, once maybe I could live with but twice, that is just unacceptable. Perhaps if you tested the car as a gas-saving plug-in instead of a hot rod you would have found different results.

 

As long as English is the primary language of the person who reads the message, the last sentence says it all

 

It's a shame that cars get tested as either fetish objects or appliances, with little or nothing in between.