For years, the emoticons (happy, sad and neutral faces) shown on the lists of reviews on Carsurvey.org have been based purely on the answer to the question “Would you buy another car from this manufacturer?”

Although this question was often a good indication of a reviewer’s overall opinion, there were a significant number of reviews where it didn’t work at all.

In order to address this, the numerical ratings (Performance, Reliability etc) are now also taken into account when deciding which emoticon to display for each review, and this seems to significantly reduce the cases where the emoticons don’t reasonably reflect the general sense of the review.