Because mine has been 100% reliable and my customer experience was good, I'm just a blind fanboy, right?
No, but it makes you
one data point. CR's reliability ratings are based on hundreds of data points per car. (They require a certain number of responses before they add a model to their reliability ratings. I don't recall the exact number, but I think it's somewhere around 200.)
And "ethical principles"? They offered a car for sale, I gave them my money, they gave me a car. Not really sure how that's unethical?
Tesla has been roundly criticized for a number of business practices that can be considered lapses of ethics, ranging from poor customer service to poor treatment of employees. Whether you believe such accusations and whether they're important to you are for you to decide, but discussing them is perfectly reasonable. CR does not currently try to factor such things into their ratings. (They did when they were first founded many decades ago.)
I grew up trusting Consumer Reports, so I have a hard time just throwing them under the bus. I do feel like they are in a tough place though. They have spent quite a bit of time developing more quantitative ways of measuring things like reliability. In a last millennium/ICE world, every time that the car needs an update of any sort, that is a negative statement about its reliability. It is essentially a recall. In the world over the air software updates, more software updates means more new features are added to your car overnight. A much more positive thing.
Those are fair points, and ones that CR has addressed in articles, although AFAIK their numerical ratings don't yet give any sort of advantage to cars with OTA updates. A problem that's fixed by an OTA update would likely not qualify for being reported as a reliability problem in their survey, though, since the survey's wording is something like (from memory, and so imprecise) "a problem that's serious because of downtime, cost, or safety." Since problems fixed by OTA updates are fixed for free and involve no downtime (unless they're
very serious bugs), owners probably should not report them. They
could be safety problems (like the dog mode bug that was recently reported), though. Of course, what owners
actually report as problems is another matter, and that's a weakness of survey research.
Similarly, does one give extra credit to electric vehicles because you never have to bring them in for an oil change, where every ICE vehicle has to do that and often gets extra service at the same time? The overhead of those visits isn’t really considered because it is required of all ICE vehicles.
That's a fair point, and again, it's one that, AFAIK, CR does not currently incorporate in their numeric ratings. They do update their numeric formulas from time to time, and perhaps they'll do so for this factor. You can always write to them with questions and suggestions.
I see this technique used repeatedly. Complaints to a forum are not indicative of overall quality and should not be used as a measure of such. Forums exist in large part to resolve complaints. Every automobile forum is the same. I formerly owned a BMW 3-series and a Smart Car. Their owners' forums are filled with posts from people seeking answers to problems.
It's true that you can't judge reliability by forum complaints; but my point was that Tesla's reputation for build-quality problems does not come exclusively from CR. You see it wherever cars are discussed, often in side-to-side comparisons of Teslas vs. (fill-in-the-blank automaker). When just about every discussion, whether informal or based on survey data, points in the same direction, it's hard to convincingly argue that the truth lies in the other direction.
Actually what they don't take is advertising, but if you look at their list of who keeps them in business (donates money) then you'll see where they might have some biases.
CR's donors list is
here. Offhand, I don't see anything there that indicates any cause for concern about anti-Tesla or anti-EV bias, although I certainly haven't researched the many individual donors to see who might own Ford stock or work for Exxon/Mobile. (The Ford Foundation is a major donor, but despite its historical links to Henry Ford, the modern foundation appears to have no significant links to the automaker.)
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.
Those are indeed problems, but they have nothing to do with "reliability". Reliability means (generally) how often is the car not going to work when I need it. Will I be left having to call a cab? Will it break down and leave me at the side of the road? It can also include how often it will leave me uncomfortable, perhaps by the heater not working, or the music refusing to play right.
CR's definition of reliability does include fit-and-finish issues as well as major-breakdown issues. I suspect the reason is that, whether a car's wheels fall off or the USB port stops working, it's a hassle to get it fixed. Getting such problems fixed is likely to disrupt your life, perhaps including such factors as taking time off work, arranging for alternative transportation, etc. My previous car (a Chevy Volt) was in the shop for about eight or ten days over the course of the 2.5 years I leased it, even aside from routine maintenance, and that was a significant problem for me. As I noted in an earlier post, CR does weight the leave-you-stranded-at-the-side-of-the-road problems more heavily than the minor-hassle problems, so they are not insensitive to your point of view; but I agree with CR's definition -- anything that requires an extra trip to the shop, beyond routine maintenance, is a reliability problem, albeit down-weighted compared to more serious problems.
Another point, which echoes some of what
@cassiopeia wrote, is that Tesla is the only automaker, AFAIK, that offers mobile service. This can reduce the hassle factor of some types of repairs and service. AFAIK, CR does not
explicitly factor this into their reliability ratings; however, as those ratings are based on respondents' judgment of what is a serious problem and what is not, it's possible that Tesla is getting a boost in their reliability scores because respondents might be considering problems less serious because they don't need to take their cars anywhere to have them repaired.
So, my overall point is this: CR's ratings are not perfect, but I don't see evidence of actual bias. As with any review, you should read CR's report on the car with the understanding that your needs and preferences may not exactly match those of the reviewer, and treat the review appropriately.
