Unfortunately many products Choice does not do longevity based testing, to determine the long term durability or fault free status of a product. Some products, such as mattresses, they do simulate longevity type testing in their laboratory to give an indication of how the mattress will shape up over time.
Choice provides opportunity to do so in two ways for products it has tested, one is in the Community like you have just done…and on the Choice.com.au website, for individual product reviews by providing the opportunity to provide comments at the bottom of the review page.
In relation to providing feedback prior to testing, this can be difficult as a common fault with a product may occur soon after the product’s release or many months after the product’s release. If Choice say waits 6 or 12 months in the hope to receive feedback on a products reliability/durability, when the review is ultimately released by Choice the model may be out of date.
Also, with any product, some can have very long fault free lives while others, like it appears your treadmill is an example, has a number of faults over the first 12+ months. Often in reviews only products which have faults are heard of and this can easily bias the impression of a product. An example being, say 1% of product X has faults in the manufacturer warranty period, and only the owners of product X with a fault provide feedback. One reading consumer feedback on the product could take the view not to buy product X as a result…when in fact 99% of product X performed as expected and were fault free in the manufacturer warranty period. This demonstrates the challenge of asking for product feedback, and occurs with the feedback for any product using review based methods common on the internet. Choice tries to get around this bias by carrying out annual product reliability surveys to get a better appreciation of the reliability and experiences of common household products (TVs, fridges, washer, smart devices etc). Unfortunately, I can’t recall treadmills being part of this survey.
Maybe there is an opportunity for Choice to broaden their annual reliability survey to also include some of the more specialised products they have reviewed in the past year, or plan to review in the upcoming year.
