Public reviews on products, especially car parts, are about as reliable as gas station toilet paper. A lot of good quality products get bad reviews because of something the user or installer did wrong that had nothing to do with the product's quality. In that same sense, placebos frequently get 5-star reviews.
People are subject to bias and can easily fabricate a problem where it doesn't exist based on those biases. I'll use a recent scenario with my teenage daughter as an example. We've been trying to get her to expand her palette beyond that of a 5 year old. Even small things. She loves Cheez-its, but she will only eat the original ones. I tried getting her to eat one of the "extra toasty" ones. What I did was a slight of hand where I appeared to grab a toasty one from said box but actually handed her an original one I was hiding in my palm the whole time. (to prove a point to her) She begrudgingly took a little bite off the corner of it and immediately spit out claiming how disgusting it was. (as I predicted) She psyched herself out and never even gave it a chance. That's how I kicked off a lesson on biases and other psychological phenomena in our homeschooling.
One doesn't have to be a naive teenage girl to be subject to this. Take the scenario of Mr. Chevy Van Fordsux going into their friendly small town O'Reilly's. Their favored Wix filter is out of stock, and they don't like it. They complain about it to the 18 year old behind the counter as if its their fault. Reluctantly, they grab an equivalent Microgard, which they believe to be inferior, because their engine has 3,000 miles since the last oil change and will send a piston to Mars if they don't get some fresh Rotella and Lucas Oil Stabilizer in it right now.
They change the oil, and in a fit of rush and annoyance, they don't get all of the gasket material off the housing before spinning on the new Microgard filter. It leaks a little. Because they've already convinced themselves that filter is inferior, it automatically gets the blame despite the leak having nothing to do with the filter itself. Any other scenario doesn't even remotely come to mind because they are already convinced, in 0.2 seconds, that the filter is the problem.
Unfortunately, this is a common scenario with a lot of people. People give bad reviews on bread because they unknowingly have a gluten sensitivity. People give bad reviews on spicy doritos because their stomach hurt after they ate an entire family size bag in one sitting. People give bad reviews on motherboards after they never updated the bios, bad reviews on video games when they bought it beta, bad reviews on paint when they didn't match to ensure they had the right color, etc... reviews are loaded with biased and ignorant BS. Plus, people very rarely post positive reviews. A product can look overwhelmingly bad if only the 0.1% that fail are being reported.
