I was doing a client visit for about a week about 5 or 6 years ago with VW at their Wolfsburg plant and while I was there I saw an employee's VW catch fire and burn the cabin interior completely to ashes. He had been driving to work (the plant is HUGE so I guess he was technically driving at work) and was lucky to have escaped, he had to abandon it in the middle of the road. The guys I was there to see said that those kinds of things don't happen every day, but they happen often enough that they weren't surprised.

Meanwhile, two points about Consumer Reports - their readers are not enthusiasts, their criteria for evaluating a product is value to the average joe -- that's why you hear audiophiles laughing about CR's stereo reviews, videophiles who have coronaries when they hear that CR says that all DVD players are the same in picture quality so buy on price, pc geeks who totally diss their home computer reviews (and for PCs in particular there is no way you can expect a print publication to be current with the market) as well as car enthusiasts who scoff at their consistent picks of various family sedans as their editor's choices.

If you want the hardcore reviews of products, stay away from CR -- if you just want to buy something to do the job and get reasonable value for a reasonable price and you really don't care about the details, then CR is the place to go. The one characteristic that CR has over every other source of product reviews is that they will go to the ends of the earth to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest. They don't accept advertising, they don't accept free/discounted review merchandise, they don't even tell the merchants that sell them product that the buyer is there for CR. They won't even let a company use their reviews, no matter how positive, in any form of advertising.

Where it is biased, and they make no secret of this, is in having a liberal editorial viewpoint. But, at least they are up front about that - unlike just about all other review publications that take some form of compensation from the vendor's supply chain without informing the public.

On the matter of the reliability surveys, those do come from a self-selecting group - only members of Consumer's Union are able to participate and then only those that actually send in the survey's get counted. So they are not a truly random sample of the population. Nevertheless, the results of the surveys tend to be in line with most peopple's reality.