[awesomebase]

I think the reality of the matter is that though CR does a pretty good job at rating vehicles as they are, that trying to predict reliability is just very subjective. Certainly one can use a host of scientific measures based on materials, use, past history, etc, but none of that seems to be evident here.
And again the keyword here is “predicted” reliability… though, as others have mentioned, it would have been better if they just said that this info was unavailable since it is a new model.

On another note, I don’t see why there is all this hostility towards other truck brands. Just because the Tundra is a great truck, doesn’t mean that the others aren’t good as well. I really liked the leather in the Chevy and the auto-AWD and flip-up seat in the crew-cab and the locking differential. The column shifter stunk and so did the use of space and the fact that it was a 4-speed, but it was still a great truck. I think that people’s past experiences are going to motivate them to go in one direction or another anyway.

To previous comments about sales numbers… the Tundra is certainly selling to many that had domestics before. The 40-20-40 numbers cited by Toyota corp are pretty accurate, even when looking at previous sales numbers because the big increase in sales when all others are declining (due in part to the drop in housing construction and the like) show that out of the approx 160K trucks sold so far, that 65K being previous Tundra owners, 65K being previous Detroit3 truck owners, and 30K being “new” truck owners is about right since the difference between sales so far (from February on) have already greatly eclipsed sales from last year at just over 120K trucks. With 4 fewer months in sales right now and a 33% higher sales figure than all of last year in a bad market shows that many truck buyers are coming from the domestics. Combine that with lower domestic sales than last year and it shouldn’t be too hard to see that when the numbers for all the 07 sales are done, probably 75K to 80K of them will have gone to previous Detroit3 owners.

One last note about the CR study that I had to laugh at… it rated gas mileage for the Tundra as pretty bad. But every comparison test done, from Car and Driver, to edmunds, to R&T shows that the Tundra was better than the competition and was overall closer to their EPA ratings. I’m averaging around 17 to 17.5 driving around 50/50 highway/city and around the DC beltway, sometimes you just sit there or maybe roll at 5mph. I have neighbors with Nissans, Fords, GMs and all of them get worse mileage. So, I don’t know where they get their stats from or if it is just relative to the whole vehicle mix, but certainly this 5.7 engine is doing well in this area…