They are a non-profit with a 55-year history, a stellar reputation and a track record of calling out any issues found. Their test results are broken down in a detailed way, and they have useful graphs like price vs rating. They actually buy their products instead of taking prototypes or commerical samples. They report the real-world, online consumer prices. Their own prices are reasonable (8€/month for all access, incl. PDF downloads).
Washing machine tests are actually one of their staples. See https://youtu.be/6Oke76VZiRw?t=48 (0:48 long term testing, 1:04: standardized lab prepared detergent, 1:56 standardized test clothing and loading schema, 2:15 waste water analysis, 2:36 analysis of cleaned cloth via light reflection, 2:49 power/water usage, 3:31 acoustic test lab, 4:05 useability)
The Which magazine sounds like Consumer Reports, who purports to have no interest outside of the consumer's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Editorial_ind... I wonder if the HN community has had positive / negative experiences with CR relating to this topic
My grandparents (in England) were longtime subscribers to a magazine named Which (which.co.uk). I have no idea if it's the same thing anymore, but at least 15 years ago it was a (very middle-class, quite expensive) magazine that would review family cars, vacuum cleaners, televisions and so on. The whole selling point of that magazine was 50 years of built-up trust, they'd lay out in detail how they'd do their blind testing and their rigor in testing, and very publicly owning when they made mistakes or got things wrong. Are there any online equivalents that have this sort of cache and trust associated with them? If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?