As with any other site, it is ok to take their OPINION into consideration but I would not take anything there as solid fact. 

Word of mouth/mechanic advice surpasses anything you may find on the internet if you want to know the truth about a certain vehicle's reliability. We see A LOT of cars, and some like Scotty have many decades of experience and can tell you what the real story is.

IMHO Carcomplaints.com is a pretty good source of info, and so is Consumer Reports - BUT, they both have limitations. They are very limited in "sample size" as they have info based on a few hundred cars of a given model, and are based on reports by the owner, who may not have a lot of mechanical knowledge.

But they both give you a good general idea of what's bad. Where they tend to be inaccurate is with low volume cars (not enough examples to generate info) and newer (less than 5 years old) cars - not that many cars break down early in their life, and when they do, they mostly get fixed under warranty. It's like the car magazine stories about 40,000 miles of ownership - it really has to be junk (cough Range Rover cough Alfa) to be troublesome that early. Me, I want to know how the car will hold up at 140,000 and 240,000 miles.

Finally, "your mileage may vary". There are no doubt a few Alfas and Fiats that have lasted hundreds of thousands of miles with few problems, and a few Toyotas and Hondas that have been lemons. This kind of info predicts the ODDs of an outcome, not the actual individual car's outcome.

The most useful element of carcomplaints.com is tracking what are called "pattern failures." When it's the same problem, over-and-over-and-over-again, as is the case with their "worst vehicles" listing, it's valuable. The links to TSBs is also worth checking out, as well. 

It depends because some complaints are understandable and accurate but I’ve noticed that Toyota and Honda owners are VERY nit-picky and will whine about anything. 

I would say take everything with a grain of salt.  Cross-check what you hear and read with other sources of information.  The best source of information comes from the honest, independent mechanics (first you have to find them, but that’s a different story) that have experience working on cars for decades and have pretty much seem them all.  In my book, well known examples are Scotty and Car Wizard, but I sometimes even disagree with them on their assessments.  Why can I do that?  Because I research the snot out of cars, I have a general idea how cars work, and I also use some logic/common sense along the way, and sometimes even those guys are not in tune with the nuisances of each make and model.  But those guys help me hone in on the vehicles to buy and avoid, but from there you really have to do tons of research yourself and validate some of the information you read and hear.  Trust but verify as they say.

At the end of the day if you buy a vehicle and it turns out to be a mistake, you have no one but yourself to blame.

Well, just consider the fact that it's ONLY complaints. You won't hear from all the happy owners who like their cars.