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They only review the initial experience with the product. If a car has an engine that explodes in a few years, or an electronic device loses updates in a year from purchase and turns into a brick - CR will not capture this.

What do you mean? I have been a member for a number of years and they ask me either yearly or semi-yearly if I still own the product, if I would still recommend it and about any new major purchases.

Products I have been asked about more than once:

Heat Pumps

Cars

TVs

Huh, happy to be proved wrong. I guess I had conflated CR with JD Power.

That's not exactly accurate. Have you seen the pages and pages of red and black circles? They track the reliability of vehicles over time (5-10 years) broken down by problem area (transmission, electrical, etc). That's where the real value is.

They do first party reviews though. That's a bit different i'd think.

paywalled

I know it doesn’t solve the problem for everyone, but many public libraries offer free access to Consumer Reports.

Testing products costs a lot of money.

Especially expensive physical products that you want to review without bias.