GS blamed for Lexus' alleged decline in reliability

In Thursday’s USA Today, Chris Woodyard and James R. Healey lead off with, “Toyota’s vaunted Lexus luxury brand has fallen from first to fifth in Consumer Reports magazine’s annual predicted reliability survey.” They then spoke with David Champion, the magazine’s director of automotive testing, who attributed Lexus’ fall to the new-for-2006 GS.

If you actually look at the relevant chart in the April 2007 issue, you’ll see that the top seven are so close together that the difference among them isn’t meaningful. The difference between #1 Toyota and Honda and #5 Lexus is about 0.1 problems per car CUMULATIVE over the first three years.

In other words, USA Today and CR are greatly exaggerating the amount reliability differs in order to sell papers and magazines.

My full take on this:

http://www.truedelta.com/blog/?p=57