Ok, so we picked up the Consumer Reports magazine at the grocery store with the lead cover being the 2009 New Car Preview – Best & Worst cars in fuel economy.  At first glance it looked like a lot of current useful information.
As we reviewed the information looking for the holy grail of gas mileage and creature comfort a few things  stood out.  The biggest thing we took away is that in spite of the hunger for better fuel economy is it business as usual with the auto makers?  It is a given that a work truck is going to get poor gas mileage but it appears  the manufacturers are pumping out business as usual.  The line up of cars mostly in the 18-22 mpg range seems to be about standard.   If this is improvement then we must get the news out that people need solutions.  While in the same grocery store another patron was clearly discussing that she was getting food and had no gas to go anywhere else.
We would recommend you save your gas before driving out to buy the magazine.  It is chocked full of the usual consumer reports style of comparisons but when you look closely there is a big gaping hole in the quality of the report. We noticed the test vehicles were not necessarily new models but the casual look at the summary scores of what’s better is misleading.  We say this because for example the Mazda3 test vehicle was a 2004 iSedan.  The narrative talks about getting 30mpg but to be fair to us as consumers we would simply not accept car data 5 years old.  That is not relevant.  We could go on and on with other examples of aged models included in the magazine.  We were surprised to see however that the Hummer H3 and the Toyota Tundra reliability expectation ratings were low.
The articles did provide data of great interest and value that shows how components vehicles performed over time by including a year by year summary.  This is handy if you want a used car because you can get a quick view of performance for other owners which could help you avoid or at least know you need to look for certain classes of problems before making your used car purchase.  This is a reason to buy the magazine, getting pertinent information about 2009 vehicles will have to wait.  We look forward to the usual quality and apples to apples comparison.  Comparing and scoring cars from 2004 to 2008 and calling it 2009 car preview data simply misses the mark. The edition we discussed here shows to display until November 10, 2008.  Many magazines stopped putting the publishing month in order to get more mileage out of each magazine.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Transportation. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.