• by Karl Greenberg , October 8, 2007

U.S. News & World Report is girding its loins to join the likes of Edmunds.com, Kelley Blue Book and TheCarConnection.com in the online world of automotive rankings, reviews and consumer guidance and pricing info with its first consumer auto research site, RankingsAndReviews.com.

The Web site--which the Washington, D.C.-based magazine launched on Thursday--will not cover only cars and trucks, but that market is the site's point of entry into consumer product ranking.

The free-of-charge site differs from the above in at least one respect: it doesn't actually review any vehicles, and doesn't have field writers who contribute articles, industry news and features. Rather, the site bases its rankings on the reviews of others--ranking vehicles and brands by a numerical 1-10 score, based on qualitative and quantitative measures sliced and diced by the U.S. News algorithm machine that powers its well-known service-sector rankings of colleges and hospitals.

The Web site filters product reviews, government safety ratings and reliability statistics; then editors "distill the collective wisdom of the nation's auto press and experts on safety and reliability" to create a "meta-review" for each vehicle.

As a sampler, the company Thursday released a ranking--based on its system--of top automobiles by category: Honda Civic won in small cars; Honda Accord and Toyota Camry tied in mid-sized cars; Honda CR-V took the No. 1 rank for compact SUV; Chevy Tahoe and Cadillac Escalade won for affordable large SUV and luxury large SUV, respectively.

Generally, per the ranking, foreign makes ranked first in 17 of 23 categories, while American automobile manufacturers ranked first in six of the categories. Honda captured the most top rankings, and Toyota came in second.

Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News & World Report, says that the company started planning the site about a year ago. "It's very consistent with what we do with our college and hospital rankings," he says. "We are collecting an assortment of numbers and crunching them in a formula that gives people apples-to-apples comparisons. It's not about our judgment being out there; it's a compilation of the most valuable objective data, whether from J.D. Power or Edmunds.com, or Car and Driver."

The machinery behind the curtain is via a joint venture with McLean, Va.-based Bulletin News Network, an information aggregation company involved in disparate activities, such as providing daily media reports to the White House to produce its daily media briefing and arrangements with LexisNexis and the Congressional Quarterly Report.

Kelly says that the site is driven by advertising, and that consumers can build a vehicle on the site, obtain an MSRP or invoice and request a dealer, à la competitive auto commerce sites.

"We will deliver what advertisers need but the first, most important thing is the U.S. News brand: We will bring in a big audience."

He wouldn't speculate on site traffic numbers, but says the site, which expects to get "millions of page views per month," saw traffic triple by mid-day Thursday. "We were on the first page of Google. The good thing about working in the brand is that we aren't a start-up; the search engines 'know' the U.S. News brand so we have big capacity to market ourselves."

That, he says, will include PR, keyword purchases, links and partnerships. Per Kelly, the site's advertising real estate is sold out by a variety of automakers.

"There's always room for something new in recommendations," says James Gregory, CEO of consultancy CoreBrand. "Apple has proven that over and over, so it's a matter of trying to find what has traction. The [U.S. News] brand will certainly give credibility to their offering, initially."