Hacker News Reader

Comment by pinko | Hacker News Reader

Consumer Reports will also inform you of things like this in advance, if you look. (For this and 100 other reasons, It's worth paying for a digital sub.)

View on HN

Consumer Reports reporting is bought and paid for by the OEMs. They'll make a big issue out of nothing or minimize real issues depending on where the money is coming from. This goes back at least as far as the Samurai rollover scandal.

Pretty much all industry journalism where the journalists depend on being in the good graces of the manufacturers to get the access they need to make their content is like this.

Consumer Reports buys all the items they review, anonymously.

That doesn't stop them from doing questionable stuff and playing favorites. All this was aired publicly in the lawsuit Suzuki filed.

Yes, many people make many claims. You should think about which ones to believe.

i don't know how you can say they play favorites. internal memos show that suzuki knew that they had a rollover issue because of the narrow wheelbase and CR called them out on it through testing.

The vehicle proved to be equal or less rollover prone than the competition (especially the Bronco II which IIRC holds the record for the most rolled over vehicle) in actual service and per the stats compiled over the years by the NHTSA

So it really kind of begs the question what axe CR was grinding. In the lawsuit it came out that one of the writers managed to put it on two wheels incidentally not part of the tests and that they monkeyed with the tests they were running to try and replicate that.

Is that total rollovers or rollovers per mile? Because there were a hell of lot more Broncos on the road than Suzuki ever sold across their entire lineup.

We're talking about the Bronco 2 here, not the normal Bronco. Rollovers compared to production numbers. Someone crunched the numbers and IIRC it comes out to 20-something percent of Bronco 2s were rolled. I can't find those numbers but I did find that the fatality rate almost doubles the Samarui.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/ford-bronco-ii-history-e...

And I found this hilarious gem:

https://www.broncocorral.com/articles/ford-bronco-ii-rollove...

I don't think anyone would expect to do a 30mph J turn in anything except the most car-like of modern SUVs and expect to maintain upright. Perhaps getting away with that sort of stuff is a reflection of the kind of tires they had at the time.

This is quite literally the opposite of true. Consumer Reports remains the shining exception to this practice, unlike Wirecutter, etc.

Yea, tell that to Suzuki.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com