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Two decades ago, when Consumer Reports started evaluating treadmills, it built a test machine it called the Johnny Walker. A drum-like steel cylinder studded with green rubber balls, the Johnny Walker spins above the rolling belts of its victims, pummeling them with blows meant to simulate the footsteps of a 170-lb. runner. In the early days, after a few hours of insistent pounding, some treadmills caught fire.
The fitness equipment industry has since figured out that it can't incinerate its customers—and the Johnny Walker keeps racking up the miles. It recently beat one treadmill so badly that the machine's motor fell out. The manufacturer suffered the consequences in the pages of the magazine, earning a rare yellow box with a check mark, which is even more dreaded than the more frequently seen black "blob" for poor performance in Consumer Reports' unique graphical rating system. (Total approval, as longtime readers know, is a red blob completely filled in.) "We gave that one a 'don't buy' rating," says Rich Handel, one of the magazine's 107 professional testers.
The Consumer Reports National Testing & Research Center is housed in what was once the headquarters of a mimeograph company in Yonkers, N.Y. It is designed for the scientific torture and performance rating of almost anything that can be purchased. In the same room as the Johnny Walker is a machine that drops bike helmets on anvils to see how well they will protect the heads of cyclists. Down the hall, tester Nelda Adell oversees a Rube Goldberg-like contraption with a long, machine-driven arm that robotically scrubs pots with steel wool. It's set to administer 500 scrubs, but Adell says no pot has made it past 400 without a mark. "Some of them say they have a 20-year guarantee," she says.
There's something charmingly retro about Consumer Reports, which is published by Consumers Union, a nonprofit advocacy group with 640 employees. It's a no-frills, not-for-profit publication that prizes the credibility of its ratings above all else. The magazine has never taken an advertisement. "The only people they have to answer to are their customers, the readers," says Samir Husni, a magazine consultant in Oxford, Miss. "They don't have to think twice about saying anything—good or bad—about a product." You'll never hear of Consumer Reports cutting a deal with Angelina Jolie for a cover shot. When the magazine needs models for a photo spread, it often grabs its own employees and snaps photos of them under the hoods of cars or painting decks.
In the past six months the 74-year-old magazine has challenged some of the world's most trusted consumer brands. In April, Toyota Motor (TM) recalled its 2010 Lexus GX 460 SUV after the magazine put the car through tests at its automobile testing operation in East Haddam, Conn., and branded it a "Don't Buy: Safety Risk." Testers discovered that if they drove the vehicles quickly around turns, the rear end spun so much that it was nearly sideways before the electronic stability system kicked in. As far as Consumer Reports was concerned, that made the GX 460 a rollover threat. (Toyota has since upgraded the SUV's software, and the magazine lifted its "Don't Buy" recommendation after a retest.) "Consumer Reports brought it to our attention, and we fixed it," says Lexus spokesman Bill Kwong.
In early July, Consumer Reports did something even more remarkable: It paused the Apple juggernaut. Shortly after the June 24 release of its iPhone 4, Apple (AAPL) received complaints that the phone dropped calls when users touched the device's lower left corner. Apple shrugged off the problem. It said most mobile phones lose reception when they're gripped "in certain ways." The iPhone's problems, it insisted, were exacerbated by a software glitch that made reception look worse than it actually was.
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