Only 5 of 33 car brands beat the average odds of reaching 250,000 miles

Only five of the 33 car brands iSeeCars.com studied have better-than-average odds of reaching 250,000 miles, according to a new analysis of more than 395 million vehicles. Toyota, Lexus, Honda, Acura and GMC all beat the study’s 5.4% overall average probability of a vehicle hitting that mileage mark, while the other 28 brands, including Ford, Chevrolet, BMW and Tesla, fall at or below it. Toyota led every brand studied at 19.7%, a figure iSeeCars says is 3.7 times the industry average.

The study, published September 9, 2026, ranks all 33 mainstream and luxury brands sold in the United States by their calculated odds of reaching a quarter-million miles, using odometer data pulled from thousands of listings across every model year on the road. The gap between the top and bottom of that list is stark: Toyota’s 19.7% probability sits at one end, while Jaguar, MINI and Maserati each come in at effectively 0%.

How iSeeCars calculated the odds

iSeeCars built its ranking by analyzing average odometer readings for each vehicle at every year of its age, then using a proprietary model to estimate the probability that a given model and generation would survive to specific mileage thresholds, including 250,000 miles. Analysts excluded heavy-duty vans and models with insufficient data, then averaged the results across each brand’s full lineup, weighting the calculation by how common each model actually is on the road rather than treating every nameplate equally.

That weighting matters for how the brand-level numbers should be read. A brand is not credited simply for having one long-lived flagship model; its overall score reflects how its most common vehicles perform, which is part of why a brand like Toyota, selling high volumes of Camrys, Corollas and RAV4s alongside its trucks, can post a brand-wide average as high as 19.7% rather than a number propped up by a single durable outlier.

Toyota, Lexus and Honda pull far ahead of everyone else

The top four brands form a distinct tier separated from the rest of the field: Toyota at 19.7%, Lexus at 14.4%, Honda at 13.3% and Acura at 9.5%, all owned by either Toyota Motor Corporation or Honda Motor Co. GMC is the only non-Japanese brand to crack the top five, finishing at 5.8% and narrowly ahead of Mazda’s 5.3%, which fell just short of the 5.4% threshold that separates an above-average brand from an average one. A dealer-industry trade outlet’s coverage of the study likewise flagged GMC as the top domestic nameplate, a detail that lines up with iSeeCars’ own brand-by-brand figures.

“Consumers base their car-buying decisions on a range of attributes. For buyers seeking the longest lasting vehicles, it’s clear which brands warrant focus,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars’ executive analyst. Brauer added that “the four highest-ranked brands substantially outperform the average vehicle’s chances of reaching that high-mileage threshold,” a gap the data bears out: Acura, in fourth place at 9.5%, still finishes nearly 4 percentage points ahead of GMC in fifth. A separate write-up of the same data confirmed the same top-five order and figures independently of iSeeCars’ own site.

The pattern extends to individual nameplates, not just brand averages. iSeeCars’ companion study of individual models, drawn from the same 395-million-vehicle dataset, found the Toyota Sequoia has the best odds of any single vehicle on the road, at 42.3%, followed by the Lexus LS at 38.8% and the Toyota 4Runner at 33.1%. Those model-level results track the brand rankings closely, since a brand’s overall score is built from exactly the kind of individual-model odds those three vehicles post.

Luxury badges do not guarantee high mileage

Below the top five, the study’s rankings complicate the assumption that a premium price tag buys durability. Mercedes-Benz and Volvo tie at 2.6%, BMW sits at 0.5%, and Porsche registers just 0.3%, all well under the 5.4% average despite competing at or above GMC’s price range. iSeeCars’ full brand rankings place Audi at 0.5% and Land Rover at 0.4%, putting four European luxury nameplates near the bottom of the 33-brand list.

Brauer said that pattern reflects usage rather than build quality. “A low finish for a brand like Porsche is more about how the cars are driven than any lack of quality or durability,” he said, arguing that owners of low-mileage luxury and sports cars simply put fewer miles on their vehicles each year rather than retiring them earlier because of mechanical failure. Motorious’s independent write-up of the same data reached the same conclusion, noting that Chrysler, FIAT and MINI post odds near zero for reasons that likely mix both low retention and limited high-mileage use.

The brands at the bottom of the longevity list

Chrysler, at 0.7%, Kia, Hyundai and Mitsubishi, each at 0.8%, and Dodge, at 1.7%, round out a cluster of mainstream brands that fall well short of the 5.4% average despite competing directly against Toyota and Honda on price. At the very bottom of the 33-brand list, FIAT registers 0.2%, and Jaguar, MINI and Maserati each round to 0%, meaning a buyer’s odds of driving any of those badges to 250,000 miles are close to negligible even though all four brands sell vehicles in segments that overlap with brands ranked far higher.

For a used-car shopper, the study’s own framing is that brand reputation for longevity is not folklore so much as a measurable pattern repeated across hundreds of millions of odometers, and the five-brand list at the top, not the badge on the hood alone, is what iSeeCars says should guide a buyer chasing the highest odds of six-figure ownership.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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