The 10 Most Reliable Car Brands, From A Car Dealer's View

Every car brand likes to market themselves as the best. From “The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection” that launched Lexus, to “The Ultimate Driving Machine” touting the performance pedigree of BMW, automakers like to tell us that they alone are going to offer the absolute best long-term ownership experience.

But are they telling the truth?

I have been a car dealer, an auctioneer, and part-owner of an auto auction over the past 16 years. During that time, I have seen a lot of easily detectable patterns between those brands that have truly stood by their promise, and those that were merely giving lip service.

However, one man’s experience can only go so far. That’s why over the past two and a half years, I have co-developed a long-term reliability study with statistician Nick Lariviere that now has nearly 700,000 sample trade-ins from all over the country.

These vehicles are all independently inspected and appraised by professional car buyers who are trained to detect mechanical and structural issues, which can be overlooked or unreported by the owners in other industry studies. We also take a close look at whether certain models begin to show severe mechanical issues after the usual period when new cars are under the microscope.

Most quality studies offered to the general public today either focus on initial quality (90 days) or what industry analysts have inaccurately called long-term quality (3 years to 5 years). As a result, an awful lot of vehicles end up receiving recommendations earlier in their life, and then become rolling money pits as they get older.

We decided to focus on two levels of comparison. How specific models rank versus the industry average for a given year, which can be found by using the drop boxes here, and also how brands as a whole perform against competing brands which can be found here. We wanted to show whether specific brands and models were living up to their public billing, or simply using clever words at the beginning and shafting their customers in the long run.

The 10 worst vehicles and the 10 best vehicles have already been covered. However, the majority of new car buyers are brand loyal (51.5 percent buy the same brand according to the market analysis firm R.L. Polk). Therefore, we’re focusing specifically on the 10 best brands in the marketplace today.
Listed here, the top 10 in ascending order:

10. Mercedes-Benz: Mercedes is helped by long model runs for their most popular vehicles; a multitude of models that share the same engines and transmissions; and finally, a quality initiative that made long-term customer satisfaction a priority. We should note that Mercedes-Benz and the next competitor are surprisingly close to each other in terms of long-term quality.

9. Scion: The average Scion will typically cost less than half of a Mercedes and yet the long-term reliability is surprisingly similar. This is a common theme we find in our results. Paying more does not necessarily mean you’re going to get a premium return when it comes to long-term reliability.