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Comment by windexh8er | Hacker News Reader

> Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products & services are not the best, and often times criminally bad.

Agreed. As a PSA do not use the True Car services that are "included" in a membership. It's basically a free pass to sell all of the contact information CR has on you to any dealership that's paying them for leads. You will be hounded for weeks if you try to use that service. I recently found out, through a family member, that the deceptive practice still exists when they were trying to get actual dealer invoices (which CR used to provide, but no longer does). I cannot not recommend CR enough.

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Not sure if it's any relation to TrueCar.com, but FWIW I used them 7(?) years ago to purchase a hard to find used car and had nothing but a good experience.

From wikipedia, I gather they've tweaked their compensation models and exec team since then, so no idea what they're like now.

Effectively, everyone is AutoTrader though, and you should never give any insurance or auto quote company a real phone number or non-spam email.

> ...and you should never give any insurance or auto quote company a real phone number or non-spam email.

That is the point. Given the reputation CR tries to uphold and their relationship and integration with True Car there is not much warning (if any) using that feature in CR will result in dumping your contact information to many dealerships and is a dark pattern one wouldn't expect from CR given the end user is paying for the service. For most non-technical folks I can't imagine this experience is positive after they've handed over their actual phone # and email.

I can't vouch for whatever the state of True Car is right now, but several years ago (more than once) I went there for information on the average selling price of new cars.

They had a nice histogram, showing the range and most common price and how far off msrp it was.

I don't know how accurate it really was, and if it was accurate, someone might have "gotten to them" in later years to inflate the statistics and preserve profit margins.

But it seemed to me really valuable information for negotiating a new car purchase. The special True Car price and "services" and all that seemed like a diversion to me.

It's like some other things on the Internet - a sensible person subsists on the free "teaser" information and never ever engages in any sort of relationship.

Apart from an indication of what a fair price is, the histogram showed relative discounts between models, and there's frequently/always ones that are being disdained by the public that are very good cars and dealers are desperate to move, versus ones that are in high demand that they won't discount.

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