Real-Life Reliability

Key findings;

• Land Rover ranked the most reliable car manufacturer
• RAM Pickup Trucks are ranked as the most reliable car model
• Tesla trails behind in real-life reliability rankings

Here at Leasing Options, we wanted to find out whether official reliability scores, which mostly are generated by various companies surveying their customers, match up to what the general public thinks about certain cars’ reliability. And what better place to look than Twitter, the perfect place to rant about how reliable a car is.

How reliable are the 14 most valuable car brands?

Real-Life Reliability Rankings
Rank	Brand	Reported Issues
1	Land Rover	904
2	Volkswagen	1777
3	Mercedes-Benz	2139
4	Porsche	3972
5	Nissan	4136
6	Hyundai	4322
7	Audi	5244
8	Kia	7017
9	BMW	9206
10	Toyota	10622
11	Honda	11570
12	MINI	15640
13	Ford	39042
14	Tesla	61110

“Reported Issues” refers to all mentions of unreliable-related key terms mentioned on Twitter alongside the car brand, combined.

Land Rover ranked the most reliable car manufacturer by Twitter users
 

We start with possibly the biggest shock of them all, which is that Land Rover has come out on top as the most reliable car, based on our findings, with a total of 904 reported issues throughout the whole of last year. 

While on the face of it, that seems like a lot of reported issues, it’s only until you discover that Volkswagen, who finished in second place, record a total of 1,777 reported issues. This is nearly double the number of issues of Land Rover. Mercedes-Benz, finishing third, have nearly 2.4 times as many, with 2,139 issues reported.

Land Rover has been labelled as a fairly unreliable manufacturer in other studies yet real data shows otherwise. 

Tesla is least reliable in real-life ratings

At the other end of the spectrum, we find Tesla, with a total of 61,110 reported issues, 1.5 times more than Ford recorded (39,042) who are second bottom. Not only did Tesla finish last overall but they also finished bottom for most terms we scraped Twitter for, including “Broken Down”, “Issues”, “Unreliable” and “Won’t Start”. 

The only brands that recorded higher reported figures were MINI for “Dead” (15,015 versus Tesla’s 7,612) and “Leaking” (3,960 versus Tesla’s 2,010), Ford for “Failure” (16,467 versus Tesla’s 16,379) and finally Honda for “Warning Light” (3,078 versus Tesla’s 107).

How reliable are the most popular car models?

Real-Life Reliability Rankings
Rank	Brand	Reported Issues
1	RAM Pickup	26
2	Hyundai Tucson	68
3	Chevrolet Silverado	72
4	Toyota Hilux	84
5	Honda CR-V	91
6	Tesla Model Y	216
7	Toyota RAV4	220
8	Toyota Corolla	291
9	Toyota Camry	299
10	Ford F-150	758

“Reported Issues” refers to all mentions of unreliable-related key terms mentioned on Twitter alongside the car model, combined.

RAM Pickup Truck is ranked the most reliable car model by Twitter users
 

Turning our attention to individual models, it turns out that the RAM Pickup truck is considered the most reliable car on the road, according to Twitter. In a similar set of circumstances to Land Rover covered above, RAM Pickups go from being officially ranked as the worst cars for reliability, to the best. Our data shows that RAM trucks only recorded 26 reported issues all year, 2.6 times less than the Hyundai Tucson, which came in second place with 68 tweets.

As we’ve just mentioned the RAM Pickup truck goes from last to best in our real-life study, however, another Pickup truck, the Ford F-150, ranks 9th (out of 10) for reliability according to official studies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get any better for the American favourite, as our research drops it to rock bottom, with a total of 758 reported issues on Twitter. Over 29 times more issues were reported than the RAM. 

Mercedes-Benz is the best of the brands while a trio of models tie lowest for “Unreliable” term

One of the specific terms we scraped Twitter for was “unreliable” alongside the car models and manufacturers. We’ve discovered that according to last year’s tweets, Mercedes-Benz comes out with the least number of references to being unreliable, with only 44 mentions, closely followed by Volkswagen with 45.

This syncs up well with the total number of mentions as VW and Mercedes-Benz rank in the top 3 of our real-life findings.

At the other end of the scale, surprisingly, we find Tesla, with 1,783 mentions, which is over three times as many as Ford (552) who find themselves second-bottom.

Tesla Model Y recoups some respect for Tesla

Despite Tesla scoring the lowest overall in the brand rankings, their Model Y finishes in a more respectable sixth position, above some previously well-known reliable cars, such as the Totyoa RAV4 and Corolla. 

Additionally, the Model Y finishes in the top half for multiple specific terms such as, “Broken Down” finishing fourth best and tied best overall for “Unreliable” rankings alongside the Hyundai Tucson.

Leasing with Leasing Options

You should never have to worry about reliability with Leasing Options, but if something unforeseen happens, we’ve got you covered. Not only are all of our cars brand new, but when you take out a car lease with us, we also offer our Fuel & Go package, Leasing Options' all-in-one insured lease package. This gives you everything you need from breakdown cover to maintenance and accident management, for complete car leasing care. 

Methodology

To produce this piece we began by sourcing a list of the top 14 most valuable car brands and then the 10 best-selling cars in the world. Once we had those, we then created a list of unreliable-based terms, such as, leaks/leaking, failed/failure, issue/issues etc. We then matched all brands and models with the individual terms and ran them through a Twitter scraping tool to uncover the number of mentions each term had been used across the entirety of 2022. This then provided us with a database of all issues reported, which then enabled us to create a leaderboard for real-life reliability scores.