Consumer Products: Reviews and Buying Guides using Consumer Reports
Ever wonder if you are buying a product, such as a television or a car that might be faulty? It may be helpful to review Consumer Reports Buying Guide available from Magale Library. Consumer Reports Buying Guide is “a product-test and consumer advisory publication. Publishes results of tests on products ranging from major purchases such as automobiles & appliances to everyday items such as food & cleaning products. Also examines health, money management, etc.”
- You may be interested in the companion library webinar archive for this resource: Life Skills in the Library: Research Resources for Car-Buying and Major Appliance Purchases
Here is an example of Consumer Reports Buying Guide that might help. Let us say that we want to learn about the quality of a used Chevrolet Silverado truck to determine if it is known to have any trouble areas in its performance.
First, we access Consumer Reports Buying Guide from the link below using the library’s AtoZ Full Text Finder.
The Buying guide includes reviews for the previous eight years. Next, select the corresponding year for the year of the vehicle. Typically, the most recent issue works for newer vehicles. For this example, let’s say we are looking for a 2023 Chevrolet Silverado. We select the 2025 issue.
The article entitled “Most and Least Reliable Cars” tends to provide a detailed review of the most popular vehicles, so let’s select it from the list of article titles in the results.
Once the report opens, select the PDF format from the “Access options” to see the digital copy of the original report.
The beginning of each Detailed Used Car Reliability report provides a description of how the data is collected and reported.
The body of the report includes popular vehicle models’ reported problems using major categories and a rating system. Below is an example. To understand the markings, we will need to review the beginning of each report.
