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I think the point of their testing was putting a tiny engine in a land yacht doesn't necessarily net you better fuel economy.
For instance in their road test of the fusion the 1.4 turbo didn't perform well in the city, In the video of the road test the lady described the engine seemed to have to work hard to get the vehicle up to speed. I'm sure if you used hypermiling techniques you could boost the numbers but their city tests are pretty straight forward...Stop and go, corners, low speeds, etc. They put in a fuel flow meter and drive the same course for every vehicle. All the performance data is collected on a closed test track.
I'm pretty sure they don't use data collected from their employees driving them around every day. That test is for "how is the car to live with". I wouldn't ignore their experience but I wouldn't take it as gold either. However if you are shopping for a new car it's pretty valuable info. When you go in you have data from an independent source and know better what to look for.
I'm in no way affiliated with CR... In fact I have my own gripes about them... such as buying $50k to $100k cars and not testing the new smaller eco cars... Also they are more and more reviewing pre production or borrowed cars where before they kept saying how they "pride" themselves on how they buy the car just like you and me then do unbiased testing...
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