Consumer Reports’ 2014 American Top Picks

By Consumer Reports Staff
To celebrate the best cars born and bred by the domestic auto industry, Consumer Reports has compiled its 2014 American Top Picks. highlighting the best models in 10 popular categories.

To make this American Top Picks list, there are a few rules. In general, Top Picks need to score at or near the top of their class, have average or better reliability, and not flunk any major crash test. To keep things simple, the American list defines “domestic” by brand rather than the actual place of assembly—or in the case of Chrysler, the country of its corporate parent (Fiat).

In compiling this list, we found that below-average reliability or the lack of reliability data on some impressive new models knocked some otherwise fine-scoring models out of contention.