To each person, a specific car brand such as Ford, Tesla, or Lexus may mean something totally unique.
For example, if your father always drove Chevy trucks, then the Chevrolet brand might give you a certain sense of comfort and nostalgia. Yet, to a person from a different background – say a young professional that’s always lived and worked in the big city – they might not get that same feeling at all.
Despite these varying individual associations that we have with car brands, it is interesting to look at them on a wider and more universal scale.
What if we take into account multiple models for each brand and the owner survey results for over 640,000 cars, and what if these brands are also compared via road tests using a common underlying framework?
The Top Rated Car Brands
Today’s charts use data from Consumer Reports, which published its 2018 rankings for car brands just weeks ago.
It uses three different measures to compare these car brands:
- Satisfaction: Based on user ratings, and whether an owner would “definitely buy” this model again
- Reliability: A prediction of reliability, based on user reports
- Overall Score: This is a composite of Consumer Report’s road test score and the other ratings (Satisfaction and Reliability)
Here’s a full list that includes data for all brands tested by Consumer Reports, including how many models were tested:
Article by Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist
