My approach has two main advantages over CR:

1. Actual repair rates posted, not just dots. The differences are often smaller than the dots lead people to believe.

2. Results updated promptly four times a year, and average over ten months fresher than those of CR. When shopping for a car, do you want to know how reliable it was over a year ago, when it was a year younger, or how reliable it has been lately?

Until CR releases their latest results in a few weeks, they're still using data for the year that ended back in March 2006. And even when they update they'll be covering the year through March 2007. When they talk about "three-year-old cars," for example, they're really talking about cars that were 1.5 to 2.5 years old at the time of the survey.

The results I post in a few weeks will be for the year ending September 2007 and will even include one early 2008 model. When enough owners sign up quickly, I have results on new models very quickly.

For additional differences and more detail:

Consumer Reports critique