#ConsumerReports

With strong new auto safety legislation being debated in congress,the role and scope of government regulation in the auto industry is becoming a hotly-contested issue. But one important consideration is being left out of the discussion: the role of private “regulation” of the auto industry. Even as the new legislation was being drafted, we were treated to an object lesson in non-governmental regulation when the non-profit Consumer Reports issued a “do not buy” warning for the Lexus GX after it exhibited lift-off oversteer on a test course. Because CR performs independent testing on a wide variety of dealer-example vehicles, it was able to detect this error, which prompted Toyota to stop sales and production of the model until a fix was released. Throughout the incident, NHTSA played second fiddle to CR, merely checking the non-profit’s work. The lesson: a subscriber-based, non-profit is the real front line of US auto regulation. But, as the Wall Street Journal [sub] reports, Consumer Reports is being shadowed by another organization called Consumers Digest… and you don’t want to make the mistake of confusing the one with the other.

That was fast: Two days after Consumer Reports slammed the Lexus GX460 with a “Do Not Buy” rating, and one day after ToMoCo halted the sale of said vehicle, Toyota already has a fix. Today at lunchtime in Tokyo, Toyota said to The Nikkei [sub] that there will be changes to the Lexus GX460. This in an unusually quick response to CR’s assertion that the SUV’s tail can wag too much when the gas pedal is released while turning at high speeds.

No, Troy Queef hasn’t been hired by Consumer Reports to bring a “dab of oppo” to the magazine’s SUV reviews. Nor is lift-off oversteer a particularly fun, predictable or desirable handling trait, especially in a 5,000+ lb luxury SUV. And according to CR’s write-up, the cause is a bit of a mystery:

We perform this evaluation on every vehicle we test, which includes the 95 SUVs in our current auto Ratings. No other SUV in recent years slid out as far as the GX 460, including the Toyota 4Runner, which shares the same platform as the GX.

To confirm our results, we paid for the use of another GX 460 from Lexus and experienced the same problem.

That Bible of the intelligencia, Consumer Reports, has released its 2010 Annual Auto Issue, and once again, denizens of Cambridge, Austin, Berkeley, Eugene, and their sister university towns all over the land are parsing its pages, seeking cars that will maximize their utility. Or maybe I’m projecting. Anyway, with apologies to Michael Karesh and True Delta, here’s a summary of the work of the wonks from Yonkers and East Haddam.

We thought we’d seen the last of the unintended acceleration crazes come and go for good nearly two decades ago. We were wrong. Somehow, like Camaros, Chrysler bailouts and Whitney Houston, the phenomenon has clawed its way back into the American consciousness this year. Consumer Reports even devotes an entire study to the number of unintended acceleration complaints lodged against the 2008 model-year with the NHTSA. Unsurprisingly, the big winner was Toyota, with 41 percent of the complaints, Ford came in second with 28 percent while Chrysler had nine percent. But wait, how many cases were there in total? Only 166? So, of the 2.2m vehicles Toyota sold in 2008, a total of 52 complaints were lodged about a phenomenon with no good mechanical explanation… and Consumer Reports wants us to believe that this is statistically significant?