Each year, CR independently tests about 50 new cars at its 327-acre Auto Test Center in Connecticut. Additionally, CR surveys its millions of members to gather data on reliability and owner satisfaction for hundreds of thousands of vehicles annually, spanning a two-decade range of model years. This extensive data enables the organization to create a comprehensive analysis of automotive quality, including brand. Brands are ranked on average predicted reliability, based on CR member surveys-level rankings. Speaking to the Automotive Press Association today, CR analyzed its just published 2026 Automotive Report Card. Reliability is ranked by shading: Green best; Yellow good; Orange worst. This year CR calculated brand-level score by first examining the weighted overall problem rate for all models within a brand for each model year. Then the brand reliability score was calculated by averaging models from 2023 to 2025, and some early 2026 data for each brand, where there was sufficient sample size.

“We’re releasing new overall score rankings,” said Jake Fisher, CR’s Senior Director of Automotive Testing. “That’s really who makes the best cars along with new car reliability, used car reliability, which is really looking 5 to 10 year old models that are on out in the road, owner satisfaction, our road test scores, repair costs. … We have all the information for each one of the models on our website. That’s all live right now…. We are very excited that this year. We actually have the most amount of vehicles that we’ve had for a very long time. We’ve made some changes to make the survey easier to complete. … We’ve actually gone from 300,000 vehicles in the survey to 380,000 vehicles in the survey. That’s total.”