Thanks for the tip, Steve.
The links to my regular critiques of CR's methods are earlier in the thread. They've been around for a few years. CR and many other people are aware of them. No one has argued that even one of them is not valid, much less successfully argued this.
The "for profit" vs. "not for profit" distinction is meaningless. I'm no more "for profit" than any of the paid employees of Consumer Reports. CR is interested in boosting its revenue at least as much as the average "for profit" company. Just check out how much advertising and PR they conduct, and how hard they push their constantly increasing number of paid services.
Now, it might matter where your revenue comes from. Most of mine comes from ads placed on my site through google Adsense. I have no direct contact with the advertisers, and have no idea if they're even aware their ads are on my site. So there's no way they could influence what we report in the slightest.
Sample size isn't everything--it's also how you use it. My methods and analysis are designed to make the most of relatively small sample sizes. Once the sample size is over 50, the results tend to be solid. And over 25 they're reasonably accurate. CR's manage to often yield iffy results even from large sample sizes. (Check the anomalies critique for more on this.)
I do my best to have everyone report all repairs they experience, whether or not they feel the repair was significant. No doubt some people still make some subjective judgments and under-report--unfortunately for both my results and theirs CR has trained its respondents to do this. If there's any bias in CR's results, this is the source.
With the Cruze, the time period of the survey is likely the big difference. If I look back in my stats six months, which aligns them with CR's survey, the Cruze appeared quite a bit more troublesome than it does today. This isn't uncommon with a new model--the first month or two of production can be buggy. CR's sample included mostly these early cars.
Our survey email for the end of the fourth quarter went out yesterday, and I'll start previewing the raw results to members soon. Maybe the Cruze has continued to improve, maybe it has taken a turn for the worse. The advantage of updating promptly four times a year is that any changes are reported much more quickly.
