Could the results be skewed by the publishers in view of the fact that they take advertising from these car manufacturers?
Surely they must need to inform their clients about forthcoming adverse reports and possibly react to threats of loss of revenue if they go ahead..
This is the advantage of magazines like Which who do not take advertising revenues except when they charge recommended suppliers for using their logo.
To be honest, when I was looking through some Which? magazines recently when I was looking to repace a broken oven, I had a quick look through their annual Car Review roundup, and they kept on giving BMWs top marks across the board, and many of the Japanese makes came lower, quite a turnaround since only a couple of years ago.
From reading the reviews, I thought they seemed far more biased towards performance, handling and quoted mpg than reliability over at least the first three years (if not longer) and Real mpg. Given some of the cars 'reviewed' are near as damn it the same as they were 2 years ago and produced in the same factories, I'd love to know how their scores changed so much.
In my view, there's less and less fully objective and unbiased car reviews about these days - other than here, you can often get far better reviews from ordinary people doing so on YouTube than so-called 'professional motoring journalists'.
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