On Consumer Reports and Reliability Ratings

We’re car shopping. The reasons why shouldn’t concern you, but suffice it to say there’s one less SUV rolling down the road.

As we looked over the Consumer Reports reliability ratings for cars, it was interesting to hear how suspicious my wife was to a model’s sudden change from bad reliability to good reliability, but how easily she accepted a change from good reliability to bad reliability. Certainly, it was impossible to get better suddenly. But getting worse suddenly was easy.

I pointed out that in the cases where the car went from bad to good, the car had been significantly redesigned, which makes sense. Car manufacturers, after all, do not strive for unreliability (though some do seem to be trying, shall we say, a bit less than others). Where a car goes from great to crap in one model year, no major redesign was involved: quality simply declined in a horrible way.

And yet we had no trouble believing that it was easier, and perhaps more likely, for quality to go down than up. Is this human nature? Or is this just a misunderstanding of how