"Caviller" <caviller@my-deja.com> wrote in message

<snip>

You are confusing the product evaluations done by Consumer Reports with
their surveys of subscribers. The latter are extremely valuable because of
the very low margin of error. They will leave out a model when they fail to
get insufficient data for a low margin of error, but with vehicles this
isn't usually an issue (with cellular they looked at 12 regions, and if,
within a region, there were insufficient responses then they omitted the
data).

The demographics isn't really an issue because they aren't asking a
bunch of college professors what their favorite vehicle is, they're asking
each subscriber to evaluate their own vehicle. Perhaps someone might claim
that more well-off and better educated individuals are ore (or less) likely
to complain about specific defects, but again, since it's all relative, it
isn't an issue.

Their product evaluations definitely have a dose of editorial content. For
vehicles, they tend to value safety and reliability over the biggest engine
(though they don't hesitate to call a vehicle underpowered). They are
typically unimpressed with gimmicks and gadgets. This is a reflection of
their subscriber base, who typically aren't buying Corvettes or Maseratis,
and are more interested in Camry versus Accord versus Passat, or Acura
versus Lexus versus Infiniti.

For some products they lack an understanding of the cost to benefit ratio of
some product features, which often has them recommending products that are a
bit too downmarket.