Of course this happened. You knew it would happen.
Perhaps we should start with how we got to this point. In recent weeks Chevrolet deployed its latest round of the grating, universally hated “Real People” TV spots, this time claiming that the brand’s cars were more reliable than those from Honda, Toyota or even Ford.
While it’s true that General Motors has greatly increased its quality and reliability in recent years, that’s a hell of a claim to make—and one that we at Jalopnik put under tight scrutiny. When we did, we found the claim was based on a single study conducted by a market research company called Ipsos that narrowly defined “reliability” as “as the repairs a car has had within a 12 month period once the car has reached three years old.” The study was based on fewer than 49,000 respondents and didn’t break down respondents by brand, nor did it list miles driven for each respondent. It wasn’t exactly a common definition of reliability in how most owners would consider it.
In other words the study was very tailored to the point of being quite flawed, and after our report ran Ford, Honda and Toyota each challenged the ad. This later led to GM pulling the ad from its YouTube page and from many TV markets, though we hear that many of them remain in circulation, probably at the behest of local stations who already bought them.
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But that’s only one half of the story. The other is this: What does Mahk, the famously profane New Englander who hates Chevrolet and especially hates these ads, think of this study?
Behold, from Zebra Corner, the latest ad with Mahk:
I’d say it’s reliably funny, but your mileage may vary.
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