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.

But they’re really making a story out of very little, even nothing.

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. Honda and Toyota are 48 percent better than average. Lexus at #5 is 35 percent better. Hyundai at #7 is 31 percent better.

Since Consumer Reports asks people to only report problems they personally considered serious (a VERY bad way to ask the question), and they rely on people to remember repairs that happened as much as 15 months earlier, their problem rates tend to be much lower than TrueDelta’s repair trip rates. So the average problem rate for a three-year-old car is about 0.4, while that for a one-year-old car is about 0.2. Cumulative over the first three years: about 0.9.

So what’s the difference between #1 Toyota and Honda and #5 Lexus? About 0.1 problems per car CUMULATIVE over the first three years.

Yeah, that’s news worthy of the first sentence in a story on luxury car reliability.

But did David Champion point this out while being interviewed on the (alleged) fall of Lexus? Maybe, but probably not. Some people believe that Consumer Reports is biased, or even evil. I don’t. I do, however, believe that they are slow, sloppy, and willing to exaggerate the differences between products to gain publicity and sell magazines. Even at the expense of Lexus.

See, no bias.