How is the Consumer Reports review any different than any of the reviews in the major car magazines? Every review I've read complains about the steering and the manual transmission. And cars from the Big 3 are doing better in reliability, which is reflected in Consumer Reports studies. They are actually doing better in overall reliability than European cars. Here's a nice little article on the subject from 2 years ago:
http://www.edmunds.com/news/column/c...6/article.html