Car Buying Advice

• Pros and cons of buying used
• What kind of car do you need?
• Used car reliability

Used car reliability

How are used cars holding up? The reliability history charts, included in each model's profile, give you the most comprehensive reliability information available to consumers.

A vehicle's reliability can seriously affect how satisfied you'll be with a car over the years, and it can significantly influence resale value when you're ready to replace it. Important as it is, reliability is a difficult—and expensive—quality to evaluate, because the information has to come from vehicle owners; the more, the better.

Consumer Reports provides the most comprehensive reliability information available to consumers. It's based on CR's annual surveys of our approximately six million magazine and Web site subscribers. These surveys ask about any serious problems they've had with their vehicles in the preceding 12 months. They generate hundreds of thousands of responses—the 2008 survey, for instance, provided information on nearly 1.4 million vehicles—which give us a solid foundation for our reliability ratings.

For used-car buyers we give Ratings for 17 different trouble areas over 10 model years, so you can see a model's individual strengths and weaknesses. We also provide a Used Car Verdict for each model year that sums up its overall reliability. The verdicts are weighted to emphasize areas such as the engine, transmission, cooling system, and drive system, which can be more serious and expensive to repair. See our reliability histories for average problem rates on 1999-2008 models.

You'll also find a list of the Best and worst used cars, in terms of reliability. It includes all models, by model year, that have had either above average or below average reliability, so you can quickly see which models to look for and which to avoid.