CR's complaints are equally weighted. A small bug on a Tesla is weighted the same as an engine blowing out on a Chrysler.
That's not true. I don't have a reference, but I researched this a while back, and CR
does weight different problem areas (in its reliability rankings) differently. In your example, a "small bug" (say, music playback skipping tracks) will count less than "an engine blowing out." In particular, CR weights anything that's safety-related or that can leave you stranded at the side of the road more heavily than other issues.
CR is not gospel truth. CR is still just the personal opinion of a few people. I would recommend that you take a look at a Model 3 and do a test drive. Make up your own mind.
The original question was about CR's reliability ratings. Those are based on survey research, not the personal opinions of CR's testers. You could say they're the personal opinions of the survey respondents, but that's true of any survey research.
Or better, get the opinion of a large sample (not just the vocal and disgruntled) of people who own have owned and lived with Tesla for many years.
One redeeming thing about CR is that they do that with their customer satisfaction surveys. Although I will be keen to watch them try to change the methodology so that Tesla doesn't keep winning as they currently do:
This is an important point. CR surveys
both reliability (which is meant to be an objective measure, with caveats about it being based on survey research)
and customer satisfaction (which is more subjective -- but the subjectivity is that of the survey respondents). Teslas do poor-to-middling in CR's reliability ranking but excellent in customer satisfaction. The reason is hinted at in CR's road tests (which are based on a mixture of objective and subjective measures at their test track), at which Teslas excel --
when they function correctly, Teslas are great vehicles, and so owners are happy with them. They undeniably do, however, have reliability problems. Look at all the complaints on this forum about cars delivered with bad paint jobs, uneven panel gaps, broken USB ports, chargers that work at half speed, etc. Even ignoring CR's reliability ratings, Tesla has a reputation for substandard build quality. Those also happen to be the problem areas that show up as worst in CR's reliability ratings, at least for the Model 3.
That said, today's cars are more reliable than those of past decades. Going from memory, even a car with a poor reliability rating today is only likely to need about one repair in its first year. My criticism of CR's car ratings is that they seem to weight reliability as being much more important than, IMHO, it should be, given the overall low rate of reliability problems in the industry today.
As to the alleged bias of CR's reviewers, I just don't see it. Yes, they call out the touch-screen-centric controls in the Model 3 as distracting and hard to use in some situations (they are) and say the ride is bumpier than in many other cars (it is). Offering fair criticism is not the same thing as bias. Despite these criticisms, Teslas do extremely well in CR's road test scores.