EP58: Consumer Reports: The Most Interesting Episode in the World

Jon Summers, The Motoring Historian, recaps a Consumer Reports session led by Alex Knizek, outlining CR’s nonprofit testing operation (36 cars yearly, 330-acre Connecticut track) and its scoring pillars: road test, reliability, owner satisfaction (380,000 member surveys), and safety, including real-world/track ADAS evaluation. He reads key rankings, including five-to-ten-year reliability led by Lexus, Toyota, Mazda, Honda, and Acura, with Tesla last; he contrasts this with the 2026 brand report card topped by Subaru, BMW, Porsche, Honda, and Toyota, and notes Rivian’s low reliability but high satisfaction. He shares takeaways that hybrids show 15% fewer issues than ICE, while plug-ins have 80% more issues than hybrids, and discusses model-specific drags (Honda Prologue, Mazda CX-90). He explains his wife’s purchase of a 2026 Cadillac Optiq, influenced by pricing, free workplace charging, and Super Cruise.

Notes

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

Consumer Reports Positioned
Software Defined Car, by McKinsey
The Elk Test
Reliability: Vehicles 5-10 Years Old
Brand Report Card Rankings
A Digression on Ford, vs. BMW, Alfa, Austin, Morris, Rover and Vauxhall
The Contradiction of Rivian
J’s work for the now-defunct VehicleHistory.org
Cadillac Optiq
New Car Reliability Screen Cap
Mazda CX90
Thoughts on ADAS systems
Cadillac Super Cruise vs. the German self drive below 40mph
Rivian and Cybetruck issues
J wants a Cybertruck
Stack Ranking For Safety
Tesla not on the list
Thanks to Hoovie for pointing out the Cadillac Lyric

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider hailing from California. He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day. Good [00:01:00] morning, good afternoon. It is John Samuels, the motoring historian. I’m creatively torn listener, creatively torn as sunder. Do I do this? Boring episode about the Consumer reports zoom session that I sat in. Do you give a crap whether Lexus is above Honda in the overall customer satisfaction stake?

Probably not if you’ve been listening to my pod up to now, but I wanna be useful. I wanna be of value. To a consumer. I mean, my wife in this last week just has had to buy a new car for a new job, longer commute, different kind of requirements. Guess the B two BMW’s not gonna be able to wear 15,000 miles a year.

Probably. It isn’t, is it not given? It’s now got 160, so Consumer Reports has its place and then it was like, you know, you should try and make it interesting. So I don’t know if I, if this isn’t gonna be interesting or not. I still think it’s boring and I [00:02:00] always worry that if you, as the storyteller think the story’s boring, it probably is boring.

The presenter was this chap Alex Niec, Kizza Kizza. K-N-I-Z-K. He is a good presenter, actually, younger fellow than me, much more serious fellow than me. They buy 36 cars each year. There’ve been 90 years of consumer reports. Now they’re a nonprofit and they have a campus that’s 330 acres. Or six miles of roads in Colchester, Connecticut.

They buy tires, they buy child seats, and you know, all of that kind of accessory jazz as well. And test all that stuff too. 35 employees, allegedly car enthusiasts. Who knows? Maybe they are, maybe they’re the same as that. McKinsey fellow, the software defined car one. I’ll add a link. Who said he was a car enthusiast?

And then excitedly talked about dein inventing cars. I’m suspicious now [00:03:00] of these corporate types who tell me their car enthusiasts. They say they drive 500,000 miles in a year. They say they don’t just like buy the new RAV4 to test it. They will own comparison vehicles as well. So it’s a comparative measure rather than a static measure.

Um, I think that was the point that he was trying to make. He said they’re known for the ELK test swerve. So this guy’s, for those of you who, uh, don’t remember the explorers rolling over and fought, falling out, or the elk test, which I think was some Swedish test. Either way, this is, this imagines an elk or some other creature has stepped down in front of you and you step on the brakes and steer at the same time.

That’s the important part of this. You are steering and stepping on the brakes. I, I know, right? You are. You are rolling your eyes and being like numpty. Right? But this has led to SUVs particularly to roll over. That’s [00:04:00] why for some, I mean, it’s been years now, the ESPs mandated on, on American vehicles. I mean, you would’ve thought, right, when they were having these rollover things, that would’ve been the sign to say, you know what?

These up high vehicles, like, let’s just. Get down low again and make them more efficient. But no, that’s not the world that we live in. ESP is mandated, so now they have electric trickery to stop them tripping over themselves if you steer and break at the same time as trying to swerve around the imaginary, uh, the imaginary elk.

Anyway, apparently this is what consumer reports were known for. The subjective stuff they do by jury. They measure stuff where it’s possible to measure it. There’s a consumer reports online, there’s still a paper magazine, and they do a YouTube and a podcast makes you think about what a competitive environment they’re in.

Now really doesn’t it because uh, there’s so many other people doing that and they’re now in competition. They used to just be in [00:05:00] competition with other magazines on the rack, but now they’re in competition with all of these other kind of multimedia outlets. You know, their brand is what’s gonna carry them.

So they do these top 10 picks. So they road test, they look for reliability. They look at owner satisfaction and they do that through a consumer reports member survey. And the stat ratty fella, he had some stats and I didn’t, I don’t think I wrote this down. Maybe I did later on, but I was pretty impressed by the size of the sample that they had.

You know, 35 employees makes it seem quite small, but actually. The brand, the 330 acres, the 90 years, that more accurately reflects I think where they’re, where they’re coming from and, and then the other thing that they look at is safety. So those are the, their four criteria, the road test, reliability, owner satisfaction, and safety.

I.[00:06:00]

I got a screen cap of the top 10, but since you might be listening to this and driving and not able to go and look at the link, I’m gonna go look at the photo myself and tell you who’s number one. He pointed out that the whole of the top 10. Were either hybrids or EVs, but he said that wasn’t because they were hybrids or EVs.

He said it was because they were like Hondas or Toyotas and Hondas or Toyotas have the best reliability and they just happened to make the hybrid. Alright, so the first of these uh, tables looked at reliability ratings for vehicles that were five to 10 years old and they were stack ranked thusly.

Number one, Lexus. Number two. Toyota. Number three. Mazda. Number four. Honda Number five. Acura. Let’s pause a moment [00:07:00] because sir or lady. I put it to you that I think you need to think very carefully when shopping with your own money for a car that just needs to do the job and not break down, and then you can flip it on without losing too much money.

And when it does need stuff, it’s easy to find a mechanic and he doesn’t charge an arm and a leg. And the parts don’t cost an arm and a leg, and you don’t need to take the whole car apart in order to fix it. Audi not thinking about you. So that’s the two Toyota brands with the premium one doing better, Mazda and Interloper, who would’ve thunk it?

And then Honda and an Acura rounding out the top five there. And this is vehicles five to 10 years old. So this guys, if you’ve got 10, 15, 20 grand that you are spending, that is your stat ranking of reliability. So actually that’s meaningful, isn’t it? Maybe this isn’t so boring after all. [00:08:00] Let’s look at number six to 10 BMW Buick Nissan.

Audi. Volvo, number 11, Mercedes Subaru, Volkswagen, Lincoln Mini and number 16. Cadillac and now running up towards the bottom. Number 26. We had Cadillac at number 16, Hyundai and number 17 Chevrolet at number 18 Ford 19 Dodge 20 Kia 21 GMC 22 Chrysler 23. Ram 24, Jeep 25, and bringing up the rear for reliability.

The Musk mobile itself, the Tesla,

at the [00:09:00] risk of stating the obvious. The longer a model is round, the more its reliability improves. So if you are buying a year one or year two of that model, and that model has some radical new technology on it, or it’s just a straight ahead new model, it’s not that you have to expect teething problems, but you have to recognize that these are very, very complex products.

So I spoke about my wife buying her, buying a new car. She did. It was new, but it had sat around long enough that it had missed a software update. So when she was due to pick it up, it got its software knickers in a twist and needed like a trickle charge or like it needed some quiet time overnight. This is what the salesman said.

Just imagine how this played. You can drive it away, but the screen’s gonna be black. That’s right. Just that it functions as a car. Without all of the [00:10:00] entertainment screens that I thought was interesting, you know, ’cause it’s like if you’ve been away on vacation and you’ve left your PC off at home and maybe you’ve missed a couple of, you know, Microsoft Tuesday software patches or something like that.

The machine can, sometimes, if you have an older machine, it can sometimes get its nick in a twist and need to be reboot it a couple of times, can’t it? So my sense was it, it had that kind of experience. So should just interject that the car that she bought, the 2026 Cadillac Optic, I should say she the deals Vly, talk about numbers.

Strikingly. Good deal. It made me wonder why I mess around with bangers when you can have the latest technology for. You know, pretty good price or be it, you don’t have anything to show for it after two years, but you know, she can charge you for free at work. So the use case is obvious, right? You either pay for gas or, or you don’t.

So looking at new cars, the [00:11:00] 2026 brand report card rankings, who, who makes the best cars basically are as followed, number one. Subaru number two BMW, number three, Porsche number four, Honda number five. Toyota Number six, Lexus. Number seven, Lincoln. Number eight, Hyundai. Number nine, Acura number 10. Tesla.

Number 11, mini. Number 12 Kia. Number 13, Nissan. Number 14, Mazda number 15. Genesis number 16, Audi. Number 17, Cadillac 18 Ford Mitsubishi. Buick. Volvo. Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz Chevrolet. Chrysler Rivian, alpha Mayo Dodge, GMC, land Rover. And [00:12:00] at 31 with the lowest overall score. Jeep, they talked a bit about how their online presence was, you know, regularly updated with new topics.

They talked about this concept of the safety verdict, which is a, a way to combine lots of information together into an easily good, better, best kind of safety ranking thing. I mean those two lists. I read out the contrast between reliability at five years and who makes the best cars based upon consumer reports, own scoring.

There’s quite an interesting contrast there, isn’t there?

Looking at. Reliability and owner satisfaction. They use the owner survey to derive those kind of of figures. I did write down how many surveys they did. You know how large the sample size is? [00:13:00] 380,000 surveys were completed last year, and there’s more that get done every year. Who has time to do these surveys?

You know, it’s a little bit like the only person who’s got time to do the surveys is some complaining ass wipe, or somebody who’s, you know, some anally retentive person who’s gonna have completely unrealistic expectations. So I, I’m taking it with a grain of salt. You know, our four may have got a shout out there towards the bottom of, of a table for new car competence or customer satisfaction or, or anything like that.

It’s one of the greatest regrets, I think. My greatest regrets. That sounds like, you know, I’d like, I wish I’d been there to father my child, but. Right. It’s not a great regret like that, but I wish I’d listened less to what car years ago? ’cause what car would score stuff and you know the Ford would always do better than the Alpha Mayo and the BMW and the Mercedes would always do [00:14:00] better than the Alpha Mayo.

Even though your heart said the alpha Mayo, your head always said that the BMW and your wallet always said the Ford. And that was why you always ended up with the blue oval and this hubner. And you people who like Austin Rovers, this is what you. Don’t understand is that was the rubric through the second half of the 20th century was that if you were fixing it yourself, you wanted to be able to go to the Ford dealership or the scrapyard and get a part easily.

You know what, they were actually good to drive. Fords always were better to drive differently than Rovers or Austin’s or Morris’s and them Vox. That’s why Hubner and the doubting Thomas is there is such a following for fast forwards because I tell you, you bought the Ford, you wished you’d had the money for the BMW.

Looking back, I wish I’d had the balls to do old alpha Mayos, and this is my objection. It is not about point scoring with these things. It’s about what gives you. [00:15:00] Satisfaction. In fact. To that end, I’m gonna jump forward to a really interesting thing that pulled out of this was that you, you notice that Rivian ranked pretty low there for overall, like how good is the car according to consumer Reports measures.

But they had one report that showed. It’s like bottom for actual reliability, but top for customer satisfaction. In other words, there’s this sort of contrast between how it actually performs and how people feel about it immediately after they’ve acquired it and owned it and are able to show it off to their neighbors.

They have, you know, NSA style verbatim quotes to allow people to have like a proper drill down. So I thought this was quite interesting was when I was writing for vehicle history, you would always look, you know, there’d always be a question. The title that you were writing under was something [00:16:00] like, you know, Kia Engines reliability, or, you know, key Optima, good, bad or indifferent kind of thing.

That was the title that you were writing under. In order to get good information, you would have to go into the National Highways Agency website. And in there there’s lots of different complaints, so you can actually look at what people have found. It has been an issue with certain cars, and I used to do that in order to be able to lift verbatim quotes from, you know, actual reports that people have submitted about problems they’d had with their car.

I would lift these quotes straight into the articles I was writing for vehicle history. Well, the consumer Reports guys give you the same scope to do that. You can like drill into individual reports to see what people have, have said. So. I mean, bravo for the granularity.[00:17:00]

In terms of some interesting insights, hybrids have 15% fewer issues than ice cars. Plugins have 80% more issues than hybrids. I mean, I’ve actually gone as far to write down that plugins are a bad technology. With almost double the issues. I mean, maybe I still think it’s gonna work for my wife’s application, which is sitting on the highway for ages and gassing up for free at the office.

I mean, why would you if you’ve got a commute where you can gas up for free at the office? The BMW three 30 E hybrid, she looked at that bastard thing, was barely gonna get 40 miles to the gallon and it was gonna be all out of electricity before she was even to work, let alone by the time you got, she’s got home.

This thing, if she does it right, she need never pay to fill it up. We don’t even need to pay to fill it up with electricity at home ’cause she can just charge it for free out the office. There may [00:18:00] be issues with it. We’ll see how it takes these over the airwaves upgrades. It’s a Cadillac optic, by the way, which is like the same as the lyric underneath.

You are a bit worried about the General Motors reliability, if I’m completely honest, but you know, it’s nice inside white leather. Nice inside. I guess the last year’s one I had like 350 foot pounds of torque. This one’s got 500 foot pounds of torque. I mean, it’s like o on ramps. It’s like a fucking tsunami.

I’ve not driven it yet, but my wife’s gotten pretty heavy right foot, and she’s kind of gotten used to it. Hybrids have 15% fewer issues than ice vehicles. This might well be because Toyota do hybrids, whereas Chrysler do ice vehicles. So it’s not that ice vehicles are less reliable than hybrids per se, it’s just look at who’s building them, right?

All those charges and challenges and ram. Classics, not so much. All those Camrys and [00:19:00] Priuses, they’re just reliably ling on down the road, aren’t they? Gosh, Toyota, we love to hate you, but we owe the pickup truck and it’s done 220,000 miles and it’s not gone wrong. Yeah, I was gripping the wooden table there, but Toyota’s gonna a Toyota.

So for new car reliability. The stat ranking is one Toyota, two, Suby, three, Lexus four, Honda five BMW, six Nissan, seven Acura, eight Buick, nine Tesla, 10 Kia. 11 Ford, 12 Hyundai and 13 Audi, so that’s new car reliability. Honda, apparently were dragged down by just one model and that model is the prologue, which was a platform that they developed jointly with General Motors.

What we’re saying [00:20:00] there is that if you are buying a different kind of Honda, it’s probably as good as you know, the other stuff just, you just need to be aware of where platforms are being shared. I, I wonder if. This Cadillac platform will trickle down to other vehicles. That one platform lyric, platform, the optics, the little one, and then there’s like a three row Tahoe motherfucker called the Vasic or giant shit or something.

I don’t.

Rivian lasts for reliability. That was powertrain and build issues, but despite that, number one for owner satisfaction. So despite issues with the BVX three, like the electric ev, BM, BMW’s pretty reliable. Tesla’s steadily improving and so much better than they were five years ago. Mazda has been dragged down by a single model.

Again, it was the CX [00:21:00] 90 and that was so revolutionary when it was launched that that has compromised reliability, isn’t it? Rear wheel drive or something? I think it’s rear wheel drive. It’s a really like interesting thing. Mazda are doing interesting things. Look at Mazda, if you’re shopping for new. My, my wife’s never gonna buy a Mazda, but I would look at Mazda.

If I had to buy a three row SUV, I’d have a, I think I’d have a Mazda before a Porsche. Now with a, a Porsche is like a gussied up Audi nowadays, isn’t it?

They’ve developed a AI tool that’s asked consumer reports where it’s, you know, an AI tool that’s been trained on their data set. I want to really have that, if that was an AI tool or if that was just a, a search engine. Interesting. I mean, how much. There doesn’t seem enough data to be training in ai, really, but I mean, whatever, right?

Everyone has to say AI now, don’t they? And even if it’s just a crappy chat bot.

We try and buy mainstream [00:22:00] models that are most representative of what most consumers are gonna buy. The vehicles are titled Under Consumer Reports, but we go into dealerships with our families as independent people and try not to tell the dealers until the very last minute that this vehicle’s being sold to consumer Reports.

This must be quite fun doing that, don’t you think? With all the ADAS stuff, they’ve developed a whole suite of real world testing and track testing, which they feel like delivers maximum veracity for the effectiveness of, you know, the, the A DAS system. And, and I should say this is definitely a big part of car buying now.

My wife has come from a oh four BMW 3, 2 5, automatic no screen for her. The whole notion of she didn’t know what the acronym stood for, and then she was schooling me on the way the [00:23:00] different systems work and on what she wanted to use and on what she liked and on what she didn’t like. So by the time she was actually going to dealerships, she could compellingly say the BMW didn’t excite me, the Mercedes.

Well, you know, the EQE was too old man. The CLA, I’d have felt like a teenybopper. I don’t know this caddy, I mean, it was a better price for, so the knockout feature for her is Super Cruise, right? That you can just, uh, above 60 miles an hour, it’ll drive itself. And more than that, if you give it navigation, if it can stay above 60 miles an hour, not only will it change lanes if a slower car pulls out in front or something like that, it will even.

Get off one road onto another one, like change lanes and all of that. If it can maintain the speed all itself without you touching the wheel, as long as you are looking, it’ll do it. It probably doesn’t sound if you’re listening to this in 2026. Now, if you’re listening to this in like 2028 or 2030 or [00:24:00] 2033, this, this is gonna seem so old fashioned, but this is partly why I’m doing this because you know, for her, she never used cruise control before.

The concept that the car can do it all completely drive itself, that was exactly what she wanted to step into. Now, the crowds have a system where the car really will drive itself below 40 miles an hour. So in stop, start annoying traffic, it drives, and then when the traffic clears and you can get the hammer down.

It lets you take over again, which of course is exactly the way that you would expect the Germans and especially BMW to do it. ’cause that’s the way that I would have the system while I’m going fast, I wanna drive when I’m going slow and it’s annoying. It can fucking drive. You know that. That’s exactly the, and indeed.

The Gemini AI that my wife was using to help her choose what to get, that the AI very much did say, you know, the BMW is the driver’s choice, but it was glum inside and a shit ton of money, and she just wasn’t excited by it. And the sales person didn’t [00:25:00] appear to take her seriously, and I can’t believe they missed a trick.

Really. They lost a customer there because, uh, they didn’t really put forward their best product. Reliability by powertrain. Um, the EV problem types, uh, bill quality, things like body hardware, accessories, paint, trim noise and leaks. And that would be, you know, rivian had door and tailgate problems. The cyber truck was noticeably bad for all of those kind of fit and finish kind of things.

Who knew a Tesla bad for fit and finish? Wow. Who knew? I kind of really want one of those early cyber truck, the more ugly, duckling, weird white elephant they get. When, when you see one where there’s corrosion on the stainless, that’s when I’m gonna wanna buy one. The climate system played up on the lyric and on the blazer and on the prologue, they’re the same car and on the ID four and on the rivian.

Let me just [00:26:00] see what other screen caps I got here that were interesting. Ev, battery issues requiring battery placements. Lyric, blazer, prologue V nine, Genesis GV 60 ID four. EV charging issues. The on onboard inverter taking a shit. I think that’s the technical term. Ionic five IX six EV six EV nine.

Genesis GV 60 D Rivian. Anybody doing a BEV is doing a shitty job around reliability, but then you’d sort of expect that for a first generation product, wouldn’t you? So this is why hybrids have the best reliability, right? Because this Honda of build been building them and you know they’ve been doing it forever and they’ve raced them on forever, and the shit works really well.

Now

pure stat ranking for safety will give you Mazda Genesis Acura, Lincoln Hyundai. Honda Nissan, Audi, Subaru, Kia. Buick, [00:27:00] Volvo, Volkswagen, Toyota, Lexus. Mercedes. BMW. Cadillac Chevrolet, Ford, GMC. Chrysler Mini Porsche, Rivian, Tesla, Mitsubishi, Jeep, and Land Rover. That was safety. Land Rovers shit, aren’t they?

They really are. Can I say that as I’m British? Should I not say it? Since they’re now an Indian company, it’s, it’s sad that British cars are as Land Rover once associated with like the benchmark for reliability, like how the mighty have fallen or, or whatever.

All right. To wrap up, this is their top 10 picks. Best small car, civic, best mid-sized. Camry Best Subcompact, SUV Subie Crosstrek. Best Compact, SUV Subie Forrester. Best mid-size SUV Toyota Grand Highlander. I think that’s a three row one. One of my wife’s [00:28:00] friends bought one. Best compact luxury SUV, the Lexus nx Best luxury mid-sized S-U-V-B-M-W-X five.

Best small pickup, Ford Maverick. Best full-size pickup, F-150. Best ev Tesla Model Y. So the screen thing, everything through the screen plus the Nancy politics. I think that put my wife off Teslas, if I’m completely honest. I would’ve had a hard time looking at one on the drive, if I’m completely honest about it.

And I’ll hold up my hand and say, when she was looking at the Germans, uh, she just said to me. Do you think I should look at anything else? And I was like, I have heard good things about the lyric. It was hovi that ridiculous new wife of his who is absurd. But somehow I just love her anyway. And I love them together.

So, Hovi, thank you for your advice. On on, on the lyric. On that note, thank you. Drive through.[00:29:00]

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