Car Buying Advice

Choosing a car:
In this section

• How much can you spend?
• Narrow your vehicle type
• Pick the right model
• Model reviews
• Reliability information
• Fuel economy
• Safety ratings

Next section:
  At the dealership

Compare reliability for new cars

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

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 reliability information available to consumers. It's based on CR's annual surveys of our approximately six million magazine and Web site subscribers. These surveys ask about any serious problems they've had with their vehicles in the preceding 12 months. They generate hundreds of thousands of responses—the 2008 survey, for instance, provided information on nearly 1.4 million vehicles—which give us a solid foundation for our reliability ratings.

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. Predictions are made for some new models if the manufacturer's track record has been consistently outstanding. All of these Ratings are included in our Reliability history charts.

Other online reliability information sources. Although they lack the reach of CR's data, there are other services that provide supplemental sources of information.

The most widely known of these services is J.D. Power and Associates. The Power survey that would be of most interest to new-car shoppers is the Initial Quality Survey (IQS). Designed to help automakers gauge the initial quality of the vehicles they're producing, it is based on about 60,000 responses.

But Power covers only the first three months of ownership, a period when 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 CarFax, Edmunds and Kelley Blue Book. Some Web sites provide reliability scores based on feedback from consumers who visit the site and fill out questionnaires. The number of reviews for a particular model, however, can range from only a handful to hundreds.

MSN Autos provides service data based on input from master service technicians. This gives you details about common problems and estimated repair costs for a particular model.

You can also post and read messages using the Google search service. Go to www.google.com and click on the "Groups" tab. Remember that gathering anecdotes about particular vehicles is not the same as consulting a scientifically designed survey.