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Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Sabermetric Cars
I’m a big fan of Consumer Reports. Or, I guess, I’m a big fan of the idea behind Consumer Reports: unbiased systematic testing of products. Their big claim-to-fame is testing of cars.
They just severely downgraded the staple of all staples: Honda Civic. It used to be an average car (way above average for its class) at a replacement-level price. Now, the 2012 is not. You seem to get what you pay for in this 2012 car, rather than getting a great deal.
Well, according to Consumer Reports anyway. What is interesting to me is what the readers are saying (sort by most popular). You get the same kind of reaction that you get from non-saber baseball fans, which is basically “watch the damn game and make up your own mind”. The readers there are saying to “test” the car yourself by, well, test-driving it.
The whole idea behind testing a car is that you have a systematic process so that you can compare dozens of cars. Someone else will take the time to do all that, categorize it for you. Not to mention that some things you can’t test, like reliability, things that will take tens of thousands of miles of driving.
In this particular respect, CR will provide results from drivers in a backward-looking context, in that they’ll tell you problems with the cars they have owned for several years… things that may, or may not, bode well for the 2012 class of cars. One would hope it’s like a baseball player that past results will infer (but not guarantee) future results. But with huge redesign in the 2012 Civic (apparently), maybe a new talent level has been reached, and so, it calls into question the reliability of the whole car as well.
Like I said, I like the idea behind CR. But, can I trust its execution?
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