TTAC Podcast: The Best and Worst Cars with Jake Fisher of Consumer Reports

by Tim Healey

Published: January 19th, 2024

ttac podcast the best and worst cars with jake fisher of consumer reports

We're doubling up this week after the tech issues we faced last week.

We sat down with Jake Fisher, the Senior Director of Auto Testing at Consumer Reports, to talk about their best and worst cars of 2023.

And our best and worst, of course.

Click here to check it out and listen in, and don't forget to check out CR's podcast, called TalkingCars, here.

Thanks for listening!

[Image: Honda]

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Tim Healey

Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.

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4 of 27 comments

Probert on Jan 21, 2024
A BEV is about 400% more efficient than an ICE car and gets around 110 - 120 egmp on the EV cycle. ICE is about 20-25% efficient (about 1 in 5 gallons of gas are actually use for propulsion, the rest is lost in heat and noise), and a BEV is around 90% efficient. On the highway, even at its most inefficient, a BEV is much much more efficient than ICE.

2 Reply
- Ajla on Jan 21, 2024
  There are some nonhybrid ICE engines that achieve thermal efficiency in the 40% range now but that isn't a match for the 80%+(?) that a BEV can manage. Assuming similar size class and output, there doesn't seem to be much efficiency gains on the highway comparing a hybrid to a conventional ICE. There are efficiency gains comparing a BEV to either a hybrid or conventional ICE.
  
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- 28-Cars-Later on Jan 21, 2024
  "gets around 110 - 120 egmp on the EV cycle." Not sure what "egmp" is other than Hyundai's name for its BEV platform but according to this J.D. there's a bit of fraud going on with BEV mileage. In case of paywall: "In all of these cases, regulators punished carmakers that had cut corners and misled the public. But when it comes to electric cars, the government has a cheating scandal of its own. That scandal, grabbing far fewer headlines, is buried deep in the Federal Register—on page 36,987 of volume 65.When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67. This means that although a 2022 Tesla Model Y tests at the equivalent of about 65 miles per gallon in a laboratory (roughly the same as a hybrid), it is counted as having an absurdly high compliance value of 430 mpg. That number has no basis in reality or law. For exaggerating electric-car efficiency, the government rewards carmakers with compliance credits they can trade for cash. Economists estimate these credits could be worth billions: a vast cross-subsidy invented by bureaucrats and paid for by every person who buys a new gasoline-powered car." In the legal word an attorney isn't going to publish anything negative which cannot be corroborated by evidence else they leave themselves open to libel, among other things. So, two different playbooks one grounded in some kind of science and the other fantasy.
  
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Pig_Iron on Jan 22, 2024
If he worked for Sports Illustrated instead of ConReps, his name would be Fake Jisher. 😉

Like Reply
- Grein002 on Jan 22, 2024
  If he worked for Sports Illustrated, he would be unemployed.https://deadline.com/2024/01/sports-illustrated-staff-layoff-authenic-brands-arena-group-1235797884/
  
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Recent Comments

Redapple2 I gave up on Honda. My 09 Accord Vs my 03. The 09s- V 6 had a slight shudder when deactivating cylinders. And the 09 did not have the 03 's electro luminescent gages. And the 09 had the most uncomfortable seats. My brother bought his 3rd and last Honda CRV. Brutal seats after 25 minutes. NOW, We are forever Toyota, Lexus, Subaru people now despite HAVING ACCESS TO gm EMPLOYEE DISCOUNT. Despite having access to the gm employee discount. Man, that is a massive statement. Wow that s bad - Under no circumstances will I have that govna crap.
Redapple2 Front tag obscured. Rear tag - clear and sharp. Huh?
Redapple2 I can state what NOT to buy. HK. High theft. Insurance. Unrefined NVH. Rapidly degrading interiors. HK? No way !
Luke42 Serious answer:Now that I DD an EV, buying an EV to replace my wife’s Honda Civic is in the queue. My wife likes her Honda, she likes Apple CarPlay, and she can’t stand Elon Musk - so Tesla starts the competition with two demerit-points and Honda starts the competition with one merit-point.The Honda Prologue looked like a great candidate until Honda announced that the partnership with GM was a one-off thing and that their future EVs would be designed in-house.Now I’m more inclined toward the Blazer EV, the vehicle on which the Prologue is based. The Blazer EV and the Ultium platform won’t be orphaned by GM any time soon. But then I have to convince my wife she would like it better than her Honda Civic, and that’s a heavy lift because she doesn’t have any reason to be dissatisfied with her current car (I take care of all of the ICE-hassles for her).Since my wife’s Honda Civic is holding up well, since she likes the car, and since I take care of most of the drawbacks of drawbacks of ICE ownership for her, there’s no urgency to replace this vehicle.Honestly, if a paid-off Honda Civic is my wife’s automotive hill to die on, that’s a pretty good place to be - even though I personally have to continue dealing the hassles and expenses of ICE ownership on her behalf.My plan is simply to wait-and-see what Honda does next. Maybe they’ll introduce the perfect EV for her one day, and I’ll just go buy it.
2ACL I have a soft spot for high-performance, shark-nosed Lancers (I considered the less-potent Ralliart during the period in which I eventually selected my first TL SH-AWD), but it's can be challenging to find a specimen that doesn't exhibit signs of abuse, and while most of the components are sufficiently universal in their function to service without manufacturer support, the SST isn't one of them. The shops that specialize in it are familiar with the failure as described by the seller and thus might be able to fix this one at a substantial savings to replacement. There's only a handful of them in the nation, however. A salvaged unit is another option, but the usual risks are magnified by similar logistical challenges to trying to save the original.I hope this is a case of the seller overvaluing the Evo market rather than still owing or having put the mods on credit. Because the best offer won't be anywhere near the current listing.