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Does anybody know how much the severity of the problem factors into the ratings? When doing research for my last car (a prius), a lot of the prius owners claim

Does anybody know how much the severity of the problem factors into the ratings? When doing research for my last car (a prius), a lot of the prius owners claimed that a recent reliability drop in CR Prius ratings corresponded with Toyota introducing the "Entune" radio / app system. At least for me, I'm much less concerned about an app crashing than I am about the car leaving me stranded because of, say, a coolant leak.

bri3d 12y ago
On the Consumer Reports survey, respondents are asked to self-report the perceived severity of a failure along with the amount of time they were left without the car. I'm not sure about the algorithm used to turn these inputs into the simplistic CR circle-ratings, but I suspect that safety and total-inoperability issues are weighted heavily. Regardless of how the results are compiled, it's obvious that cars which already have a perfect score are susceptible to "fall off" due to moderate annoyances.