[Greenbuilding] Consumer Reports unbiased? was: What car do you suggest?

[Reuben Deumling]

To bring this back to green building (or a little closer to it), I
can't speak authoritatively to how Consumer Reports goes about testing
cars, but I can say a few words about how they have gone about testing
household refrigerators. With respect to refrigerators CR has done a
rather poor job over the past few decades of

(a) testing the refrigerators people actually buy, as well as

(b) testing a selection of refrigerators that includes the major types
and sizes.

Most of us I think would be forgiven for assuming that their selection
accounts for both of these parameters. It isn't as if they were new to
this game. But in fact, to use figures from 2004, according to the NPD
Group the average purchase price of new refrigerators US consumers
bought in that year was $534 (median) and $668 (mean), while the
selection of models Consumer Reports tested averaged $1,200 (median)
and $1,791 (mean). Similar discrepancies arise with respect to size.
The EIA in its 2001 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS)
ascertained that 53% of the fridges we have in our households are
18.4 cubic feet or smaller, and 46% of them are 18.5 cubic feet or
larger, while the selection tested in 2002 by CR was only 12% in the
smaller size category, and 88% above 18.5 cubic feet.

As for their testing covering the range of possible sizes and types,
over the past twenty years CR has tested refrigerators smaller than 18
cubic feet exactly once--in 1996--and then only to criticize them.
Manual defrost models last made an appearance in 1974, Single door
refrigerators, either with a freezer compartment inside, or those
called all-refrigerators have not been featured since the early
sixties. Their target audience is a well-off upper middle class family
who can be persuaded that the refrigerator is a fashion object. None
of the refrigerators they have tested in the past fifteen to thirty
years have been well-matched in size to the one-or two-person
households that make up the majority of US households. This is not to
say that many of us haven't gotten used to 18 or 20 or even 22 cubic
foot fridges for one or two people. But that ex-post finding is not a
terribly useful finding given the less-than-level field in which to
encounter new refrigerators, at least in Consumer Reports. And yet,
the discrepancy in average size and price described above should give
an indication of how far apart the preferences of US residents and of
Consumer Reports engineers still are when it comes to fridges.

Interestingly this was not always the case. Up until the late forties,
Consumer Reports went to great lengths to test a more representative
slice of the population of refrigerators, always making sure that
basic models were included, and consistently criticizing the appliance
industry for trying to talk its (female) customers into bigger, more
expensive models. Nowadays, though, this is all a thing of the past.
In their 2004 refrigerator test they quipped "You can never be too
rich or have too much fridge space."

Reuben Deumling

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Benjamin Pratt <prattb at uwstout.edu> wrote:
> There are personal experiences, and there are statistics. In my
> opinion, consumer reports has the most reliable, most unbiased, data.
> I'd encourage anyone making a car purchase to look at their
> publications. According to consumer reports, Volkswagens have much
> worse than average reliability. There are also downsides of diesels:
> Starting in winter, smell, particulates in the air, and higher fuel
> costs. Better mileage is a good thing, but not when the fuel is 20-25%
> more expensive.