To save the cost of mailing surveys, then scanning and tabulating the results -several dollars per survey - Consumer Reports has gone electronic and put its well-regarded annual auto survey online. We've done that, too, at PC Magazine for our Reader Satisfaction Survey years ago. Many people, me included, were surprised to find a follow-up note from CR in our inboxes recently with a request to go back and re-answer part of the survey. Seems CR forgot to make Model Year a mandatory field - mandatory meaning you have to fill it out before going further. More interesting is how CR phrased the request, gently chiding respondents by saying, " ... some respondents inadvertently missed a crucial question asking for car model year." The miss, I'd say, was allowing the respondent to proceed past a crucial question. Without that information, CR doesn't know specific model-year reliability.

For Consumer Reports, a bigger issue facing the survey than this one-time glich is the improved reliability of all cars. While its reliability reports use the same five-level ratings for decades - filled red circle, half-filled-on-top red circle for very good, hollow circle for good, half-filled-on-bottom black circle for fair, and black circle for poor - the difference between excellent and poor is more compressed now. There are no more Yugos, Sterlings, Fiats, diesel Oldsmobiles, and the British have figured out how to make electricity flow through a car without shorting to ground.