Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

consumerreports.org

27 points1970-01-0149 comments

Honestly you can't trust a lot you see in ads. You can't even trust your manufacturer or the dealership selling the cars. Some brand new cars are sold with TSBs that haven't been fixed or addressed.

I use https://www.carcomplaints.com/ when I'm shopping for a car to know which used cars to avoid.

Often, the salespeople don’t actually know anything about the vehicles they’re selling either. I’ve had salespeople who don’t know the engine or transmission configurations of the cars on their lots. I spent a long many emails recently trying to explain to a Toyota sales rep how payload capacity works. Even after meeting him in person and explaining it to him again, I was totally unable to get the real payload numbers of a vehicle I wanted to buy.

I love it when people go out of their way to try to make someone feel dumb. Why would you waste your time like that? You asked a question, and they responded in a way that doesn't answer the question. Do you think going through some sort of lecture is going to suddenly improve the answer?

That's like asking the average person to provide the answer to some differential calculus question but they don't know. You then give them a 5 minute dissertation on what differential calculus is, and immediately expect them to provide the answer by immediately asking them to solve the same equation.

I don't see how anybody is going out of their way to make anybody feel dumb in that situation.

They explained their automotive needs to a salesperson at a Toyota dealership and gave them ample opportunity to do some basic research to make a sale of them. Payload capacity is hardly a topic as exotic differential calculus at a car dealership.

>I don't see how anybody is going out of their way to make anybody feel dumb in that situation.

you're essentially giving a pass to mansplaining

I’d define mansplaining as unwanted and unwarranted explanation — it might be unwanted in the above situation, but unwarranted?

A explanation of payload capacity at a car dealership when it’s a key selling point for the customer explaining the topic and their related need? I just don’t see it being an issue.

I might not have conveyed myself very well, but I really wasn’t trying to make the salesman feel dumb. Really, he was being a salesman, and by that I mean bullshitting me. I’d ask what the payload of the Tacoma was, and he’d come up with an answer I knew to be wrong. Whether or not I wanted to purchase the truck depended on that payload number. So, when I kept sending the question back to him, I was just trying to find a way to get a true payload rating for the truck. I needed that information to inform my purchase, and wasn’t able to get that information. (The truck was on a boat in Mexico, and I’d have to reserve the purchase. I couldn’t just visit the dealership and look at the payload sticker on the door.)

In any case, I definitely didn’t want him to feel bad. When I met him, I had a really pleasant interaction — he was a nice person. But, he just wanted to sell me the truck, and really didn’t care if he could provide me correct information or not. Ultimately I gave up on the purchase because I couldn’t get the information I needed.

you are free to talk to any sales person, so after recognizing this particular sales person wasn't being helpful, you can talk to someone else including managers. if a sales manager realizes that answering one question is what's standing between you making a purchase or not, they will find you the answer. these people are all about "crushing it, bro" on their sales numbers. you can even go to a different dealership. there's also the internet.

Because they don't have to. There is no legal requirement of them telling you the truth, in fact, when you sign a purchase contract, you literally sign a piece of paper that states you cannot derive any rights to what the salesperson told you.

Their job is not to inform you. Their job is to sell cars.

TSBs are just that, technical service bulletins on how to fix a common issue. There's no requirement for a dealership to perform the TSB on a new car, a majority of cars with outstanding TSBs won't ever experience the problem the TSB addresses.

There IS however a requirement to fix any recalls before a car can be sold, at least in the USA. But there are MANY more TSBs than recalls.

My Honda Odyssey has a TSB for the transmission basically eating itself. The fix is a full transmission fluid change (3x drain and fill) and a firmware flash. My van is beyond the mileage where the dealer would do this under an extended warranty specific to this TSB, but I've never actually experienced any of the symptoms mentioned in the TSB. Van is a 2016 with 115k miles on it.

I'm not sure I'd fully trust carcomplaints either, from my brief perusal of it. Many vehicles on the site show a large number of complaints for "Soy-Based Wiring Chewed by Rodents". But the idea that soy-based wiring is particularly appetizing to rodents is urban legend. Car owners have gone to court a few times, and AFAIK every time have lost for lack of evidence. Scientific studies have also failed to show any difference between rodents' tendencies to chew elastomer wiring and bioplastic wiring.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/07/03/toyota-win...

Rodents may very well chew bioplastic wires, but they also chew non-bioplastic wires. The fact that users on carcomplaints are convinced that this is a major issue with specific vehicles I think highlights the unreliable nature of self-reports.

My brother in law was in the market for a new notebook the other day and the one he ended up deciding on did come with a bunch of stickers suggesting it was "award winning" (although that luckily didn't factor into his decision). Upon closer inspection the only actual award was for the manufacturer's customer support. None were related to the model itself.

So I'd say, no, unless the award is a specific industry standard certification relevant to what you're looking for, awards mean nothing.

I'm also reminded of the movie poster that made the rounds recently showing a bunch of five star reviews as well as a single one star review conveniently placed in such a way that it looked like the poster art was obscuring the four missing stars so as to make it look like another five star review.

I don't know if I trust this website. Like it rates the 2019 rav4 as one of the least reliable vehicles with

Hesitates And Lurches At Slower Speeds 2019 RAV4

Average Cost to Fix: $20,000 Average Mileage: 3,000 mi

I'm not sure I believe the "average mileage" of any problem is 3,000, and if it were, it'd be well under warranty. This data also doesn't align with NHTSA complaints.

Garbarge in, garbage out. If this site contains bad data it's worse than having no site, because it could move you in the wrong direction.

The same goes, if I remember my HR buddy correctly, for quite a few of those "best company to work at" awards.

So if it isn't a reputable source, why trust any of this crap? It like all these logos that companies (or industry groups) invent and use as a trust icon on packaging. Just mostly crap. My So did an evaluation of those for food not long ago in Germany. Damn that was a real eye opener.

You have to remember, you (the car buyer, employee, or shopper) aren't the target for these awards. These award companies market to mid-senior level VPs who have spending power and want to approach senior company leaders with a good story for their end-of-year review & bonus evaluation.

Nothing quite like the HR Director saying "Well under my leadership we were rated as one of the top 100 companies to work for!" But the awards company only has 100 spots available to consider, and you have to pay the awards company to evaluate you...

Damn, never thought of it that way

I used to take tier1/2 at a multitenant call center and one of our clients was Ethisphere - the "most ethical companies" people. They email blast companies every year to get them to take the stupid self-answer questionnaire and pay a couple thousand and get to call themselves ethical.

One of the big revelations I had when I worked with a marketing team the first time was so long as you pay the fee and have a good enough write-up, you'll get just about any award. No one checks the claims, just waits for the check to clear.

That year we "won" the Red Herring, WEF Innovator, and I want to say Red Dot, and a couple of others for stuff that was not innovative, nor applicable to half the stuff we claimed it was. Of course we were also a Top Place to Work according to several big publications in spite of the dysfunction and high turnover.

These are generally referred to as "pay to play" awards. They're very common. People who are in the industry generally know which awards are real and which are just "pay to play" type. But for customers who aren't as clued in, more awards always looks better!

Out of interest, can you think of any that are legit? I'd like to know what to keep an eye out for.

It's very much industry-niche specific. For example, the company I referenced above's best honors came from the American Geophysical Union, but that's (mostly) academics voting for something that truly did change the field. But in parallel I know the American Chemical Society's equivalent can be bought.

For sure I no longer pay any attention to broad general tech awards. It's like those "X under X" lists. About half are rich kids with connections and good photo ops and/or committing fraud.

I like to think some awards are less bad than others. See Autocar’s blog[1] about how they voted for the Car Of The Year award which they do every year. It seems to be reasonably transparent.

[1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/opinion/new-cars/how-autocar-voted...

Be very careful with 'X of the Year' verbiage, especially at the end of the year. There are many publications that use this verbiage for awards, and stumbling upon them via Google or other means almost always results in biased and paid for opinions.

"Best movie of the year" quotes made in February are my favorite

Youi can't trust JD Power's awards because of methodology. Initial Quality is a useful metric for the manufacturer, but not htat useful for the consumer, because plenty of vehicle might have high initial quality, but low long term quality.

I've found that JD Power's rankings of customer service for financial companies to be far more useful as customer service is useful to the consumer on an instant basis.

My understanding is that everything the JD Powers person said (quoted in the CR article) is probably true but irrelevant. I believe you can get them to make a study using criteria you choose. They then do a somewhat legit, or actually legit evaluation using those criteria and miracle dictu you are the best. It could be “cars with the paint that stays bright the longest” or “small, manual transmission cars with a defect rate in the top 10 of such manufacturers”. If you look closely at a couple of car ad that displays a top JD powers rating youll usually see that the two cars are top in slightly different standards.

So yes, consulting could be independent from ratings, and their evaluators really could be judging without considering the manufacturers, all just like CR…except the criteria themselves tip the scales.

I like CR even though I often don’t buy their top choices. Their top criteria aren’t always mine, but they explain why they rank, and also measure and report other criteria that are more important to me. So their reports still help me a lot. The JD Powerses of the world: not so much.

Can you trust any "industry awards" at all?

Yes/no. There are sources of bias everywhere ranging from outright pay for play to more subtle types of influence that some companies are better able to exert or just are better at it. (For example, there are a lot of industry awards/Top 100 lists out there that are determined by random people on the Internet voting and who knows how many of those come from some big company PR department encouraging employees to vote for their company's best-place-to-work/product/podcast/etc.?

Right, but then there are also industry awards like the crypto ones which are literally just pay to win.

I trust awards like I trust video game analytics... if the biggest argument they got (in video games) is that you can "walk XXXXX miles" and "XXXXX hours of dialogue" and "XXXXXXX planets you can land on" I immediately assume the game will suck. Because if analytics is what gets people excited about it, anyone can manipulate a turd with good analytics. Same with awards. I can make a crypto tomorrow with an award for "most innovative in X space" within a day. I can even get a celebrity tell everyone how it changed their lives.

This is why advertising sucks, and awards are advertising. Its all about trying to pretend like anything you say has merit.

I work in telcos, and literally all of them are pay-to-win. When I see those badges on a website I consider them "badges of demerit".

Can you trust anything that appears in an ad?

Can we apply the rule of headlines to this comment, so any comment that ends in a question the answer is No? <recursion intended>

From my experience working with ad agencies, on set during production of commercials, being in the edit bay, and just as a person with real world experience, the answer is not just no, but hell no.

Not sure why this article is focused on car ads. Nowadays, I ignore most of industry and many other awards.

E.g. "Ranked #1 as the most popular university among international students" (I saw this ad on a bus). It doesn't say anything about the quality of the education or the recognition.

You can trust customer reviews more than these awards.

I work on [0] and we routinely get engaged by tech publications asking if we'd like to be featured in their upcoming article "Best Monitoring Software for 2023" (for example).

Some of them go as far as listing their prices for each position outright, or mention some bidding mechanism. And it's not your average obscure blogspam, no sir. There are household names in there as well.

In fact I'm suspecting that outside of a small minority of reporters with integrity, this shady practice is simply the default across industries.

We're taking a firm stand against this BS. But it does have impact on our marketing efforts.

[0]: https://monitoro.co

Learned this years ago when trying to get a place in the Gartner magic quadrant for a small software shop. Was a pointless cash and resource drain.

The thing with a company like Gartner isn't that they're explicitly biasing their results based on how much you pay them but the whole game is rigged in general against small companies unless they've made a real name for themselves outside of the big analyst channels.

- If they're not Gartner clients, the relevant analyst may just not be very familiar with them. There are a zillion little software companies out there, many of which do a crap job of explaining what they do and what their unique value is. (Go to a big tradeshow sometime and talk to booth staff.)

- Gartner's MQ requirements are very biased towards their enterprise clients. They want customer references and have a very detailed questionnaire that may not align very well with what a small software company can respond to and, yes, is a big time sink to even try.

- Gartner does some other reports that highlight what they consider innovative small companies or up and comers but generally speaking none of those are going to be in the upper right of an MQ.

>In fact I'm suspecting that outside of a small minority of reporters with integrity

Having a boss and a mortgage usually trumps any integrity a journalist might have had.

Can anyone explain in a bit more detail how these payment schemes work? It mentions that manufacturers need to pay huge sums to mention awards in their ads. But by default, information is free. I can't "patent" a fact and charge people to mention it. So what's happening here? Do the manufacturers need to enter some kind of contract in order to even be eligible for the award? The article is a bit vague on this point.

The report is trademarked so you need a license to use it in your marketing. Plus, if you piss them off by challenging their rights, you may just not win an award in following years. The amount you have to pay (hundreds of thousands of dollars) is small potatoes to companies of this size so it is really not worth it to try and weasel out of any payment.

You cannot trust anything in any ad.

"Marketing" is just marketing for lying.

Consumer reports is funded by the Ford foundation. Interesting they didn’t mention that

I'm not familiar with the Ford Foundation or its work. However, from reading their Wikipedia article, I get the sense that they are pretty independent from the Ford company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Foundation

Per Wikipedia: "Between 1955 and 1974, the foundation sold its Ford Motor Company holdings and now plays no role in the automobile company."

One-layer deeper question: How much power/influence do people closely tied to Ford Motor have at the Ford Foundation? Looking here - https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/board-of-trustees/ - only Henry Ford III is an obvious "Ford Motor / Ford family" member of their Board of Trustees. Behind the scenes and deeper? Hard to know.

Bigger picture: Since CR has been doing at-scale quantitative ratings of cars for decades, it should be pretty easy to run some stats, and see if they have a meaningful pro-Ford bias.

Opinion: If I was running both Ford Motors and the Ford Foundation, I'd be telling CR that I wanted 100%-unvarnished-truth reviews and ratings of Ford Motors products from them. Because done-right data from CR would be a ~99%-independent check on what my underlings at Ford Motor were telling me. (And, yes, cheating in Ford's favor would be damn likely to turn into a disastrous scandal.)

>Opinion: If I was running both Ford Motors and the Ford Foundation, I'd be telling CR that I wanted 100%-unvarnished-truth reviews and ratings of Ford Motors products from them. Because done-right data from CR would be a ~99%-independent check on what my underlings at Ford Motor were telling me. (And, yes, cheating in Ford's favor would be damn likely to turn into a disastrous scandal.)

Right, but you probably wouldn't want the bad stuff published.

"wouldn't want the bad stuff published" meaning that I'd feel unhappy when there was bad news about Ford Motor? True.

But there are half a bazillion places in the modern world where bad news about Ford Motor could originate. I'd have to be either a pathetic man-child or a control-freak mental case to think that somehow preventing CR from publishing a bit of that would give a probable net positive outcome, longer-term, for Ford Motor Co.

>meaning that I'd feel unhappy when there was bad news about Ford Motor? True.

No meaning you have good data to improve your company, that's the benefit to you. Publishing said data, particularly if you haven't improved on the data wouldn't benefit you.

>I'd have to be either a pathetic man-child or a control-freak mental case to think that somehow preventing CR from publishing a bit of that would give a probable net positive outcome, longer-term, for Ford Motor Co.

Or have shareholders.

I think you can. They would not publish them if they were bogus.

TLDR no

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