This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu, visualizes data from recent Consumer Reports surveys on car brand satisfaction and reliability.
Rivian, BMW, and Tesla were the three most satisfying brands in 2024, but far from the most reliable. In terms of reliability, Japanese brands like Subaru, Lexus, and Toyota came out on top.
Data and Key Takeaway
The underlying data behind these rankings is listed in the tables below.
Satisfaction is represented as the share of owners who would buy another car from the same brand, while reliability is based on Consumer Reports’ proprietary survey data.
Note: several brands were left out due to insufficient data. These are: Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Infiniti, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Lucid, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, Mini, Mitsubishi, Polestar, Porsche, Ram.
A key takeaway from this data is that owner satisfaction isn’t necessarily tied to reliability. For example, both EV brands in this survey (Tesla and Rivian) scored very highly in satisfaction, but poorly in reliability.
On the other hand, brands like Acura and Mazda rank highly in reliability, but lower in satisfaction.
There are limitations to this data, of course. Satisfaction is highly subjective and prone to bias (e.g. Rivian is a new brand that caters to a specific demographic), while reliability is a complex metric that can be difficult to properly gauge.
