TrueDelta’s results currently include all shop trips that included a successful repair (unless this repair was a simple reflash). We don’t yet distinguish between “serious” repairs and minor ones. Often this is suggested. But doing this can be very tricky.

As I first reported back in June of 2006, Consumer Reports’ method contains a serious flaw: they ask that only serious issues be reported, and then have each individual respondent decide whether or not a repair was serious enough to report. The serious issue with this: different people are going to differently evaluate the same problem.

The problem with this approach is evident just by looking at the revised list of problem categories: they now include “squeaks and rattles.” What would make a rattle a “serious issue”? Whatever the criteria, if there even are criteria by which a rattle might be deemed “serious,” such an evaluation is going to vary greatly from person to person.

Oddly, such an evaluation appears to vary depending on the powertrain a car has. If there’s one car Consumer Reports has a beyond sufficient sample size for, it’s the Toyota Camry. Yet with the 2007 Camry, “squeaks and rattles” are “much worse than average” with the Hybrid and V6, but “average” with the four-cylinder.

How might this be explained? I can only venture a guess that the highly subjective wording of their questionnaire injects so much noise into responses that even their huge sample size for the Camry cannot compensate.

In the future, TrueDelta will likely post a separate set of results that include only major repairs. But we’ll be using much more objective criteria to determine which repairs are in fact major. And I doubt any rattles will qualify.