These are the most reliable used cars according to the study – one brand beats all competitors

The US consumer protection organization Consumer Reports (CR) evaluated the experience reports of owners of 5 to 10 year old vehicles to determine the reliability of the cars. The result was similar to another study by another US organization on the longevity of cars. Toyota and other Japanese brands once again dominate.

The experts at CR took a close look at the 5 to 10 year old vehicles from 26 car brands. Lexus, Toyota's premium brand, came in first place (Lexus is to its parent company Toyota as Audi is to Volkswagen). Toyota came in second place. Just as with the longest-lasting cars, the Toyota Group is clearly dominant when it comes to the most reliable vehicles.

Behind the Lexus-Toyota duo comes Mazda, another Japanese brand that, like Toyota, has a reputation in Germany for producing particularly reliable cars. Acura (a premium brand from Honda) and Honda follow in fourth and fifth place. In other words: the top five places in the most reliable used cars in the USA are all taken by brands from the land of the rising sun. This is more or less the picture that was presented by the study of the longest-lasting cars in the USA, which has already been mentioned several times.

CR says:

“Brands like Lexus and Toyota have a history of conservative redesigns, making incremental improvements across their entire product line rather than introducing many completely new systems.” Our data consistently shows that these brands' cars are reliable when they're new, and they remain reliable as they age.

This is confirmed by the decades-old experience of car buyers in Germany too: a lot of new, little-tested technology in cars increases the failure and repair rate.

How do German cars perform?

A non-Japanese car brand only appears for the first time in 6th place: Buick, which belonged to the US company General Motors. A German car brand finally appears in 7th place: BMW. But immediately after that, in 8th and 9th place, are two Japanese labels: Subaru and Nissan. Mercedes-Benz is in 10th place, Mini in 12th place and Volkswagen in 14th place.

Volvo landed in 15th place, followed by Audi. But we are still missing an important and famous brand: Tesla. The electric car pioneer had to settle for 24th place – out of a total of only 26 places. This poor performance by Tesla matches the disastrous result that Tesla achieved in the German TÜV. You can read more about this in TÜV: Tesla Model 3 fails most often – last place among all cars.

Porsche does not appear in the study. CR evaluated the experiences of over 150,000 cars for the study. But before you blindly grab the next best Toyota when buying a used car, you should consider these tips from CR:

It's also important to remember that the reliability of individual models may differ from the brand average. And with used cars, each car you consider is unique and has its own usage and service history.

You can find an English-language study entitled “Which brands make the best used cars?” at this link. Click on the “Show models” button next to each entry to see which models were evaluated for the study. You will see that many vehicles that are also available in Germany were included in the study. For Toyota, for example, Camry (temporarily available in Germany), Prius, Corolla and RAV4. From Mazda, for example, Mazda 3, 6 and CX-3 and from Honda the Civic and CR-V. From BMW the 2 Series, 3 Series, 4 Series, 5 Series and X1, X3 and X5.

The longest-lasting cars study says: One brand beats all others