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New car buying: Car reliability

Last updated: April 2012

Reliability Ratings show you how well vehicles have held up compared with competitive models, and what the odds are that you could be inconvenienced by problems.

A vehicle’s reliability can seriously affect how satisfied you’ll be with a car over the years, and it can significantly influence resale value when you’re ready to replace it. Important as it is, reliability is a difficult—and expensive—quality to evaluate, because the information has to come from vehicle owners; the more, the better.

Consumer Reports provides the most comprehensive car reliability information available to consumers. It’s based on CR’s annual surveys of our magazine and website subscribers. These surveys ask about any serious problems they’ve had with their vehicles in the preceding 12 months. They typically generate over a million responses—the 2011 survey, for instance, provided information on 1.3 million vehicles—which give us a solid foundation for our reliability Ratings.

We provide reliability information in several forms. For used-car buyers we give Ratings for 17 different trouble areas over 10 model years, so you can see a model’s individual strengths and weaknesses. We also provide a Used Car Verdict for each model year that sums up its overall reliability. The verdicts are weighted to emphasize areas such as the major engine and transmission problems, cooling system, and drive system, which can be more serious and expensive to repair.

For new-car buyers we provide a predicted-reliability Rating that indicates how vehicles currently on sale are likely to hold up. To create these Ratings, Consumer Reports averages a model’s Used Car Verdicts for the newest three model years, providing it wasn’t significantly redesigned during that time. All of these Ratings are included in the Reliability History charts on the car model pages.

Other sources of reliability information are available online. Even if they lack the reach of CR’s data, they provide a supplemental source of information. One provider of these services is J.D. Power and Associates. Their Initial Quality Study (IQS) is designed to help automakers gauge the initial quality of the vehicles they’re producing; it is based on responses from over 73,000 purchasers of 2011 models. But it covers only the first three months of ownership, a period in which relatively little goes wrong. It also asks owners about many subjective impressions of their vehicles, not just serious problems they’ve had. J.D. Power surveys are also the source for reliability data on some other sites, such as Kelley Blue Book and CarFax.

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