The five least reliable car brands are all domestic automakers, Consumer Reports finds

Consumer Reports’ latest brand reliability rankings put five domestic automakers at the very bottom: Chrysler, GMC, Jeep, Ram, and Rivian. Lexus, Subaru, and Toyota again took the top three spots, with Honda and BMW rounding out the top five. The rankings draw on predicted-reliability data from roughly 380,000 vehicles spanning the 2000 through 2025 model years, plus early 2026 models, making it one of the largest owner-reported datasets the organization has published.

Jeep finished last for the third consecutive year, a distinction the magazine’s testing team has now attached to the brand three years running. Ram landed 25th, GMC 23rd, and Chrysler 22nd, filling out the bottom third of the roughly 30-brand list alongside Rivian, whose entire lineup consists of electric trucks and SUVs still working through early-production quality problems. Lincoln, a non-domestic-adjacent outlier among the weakest performers, sat just above that cluster in 20th place, a sign the bottom of the list is not exclusively a domestic-brand problem even though its very lowest tier is.

Domestic Brands Fill the Bottom Five

“The five lowest-scoring brands are domestic automakers: Chrysler, GMC, Jeep, Ram, and Rivian,” Consumer Reports said in its own reliability rankings article, updated December 4, 2025. Specific models drove several of those scores down: the Ram 1500 pickup, the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan, and the Lincoln Corsair plug-in hybrid all registered among the more trouble-prone vehicles the organization tracked, contributing to weak brand-wide averages even where a manufacturer’s gas-only models performed closer to the pack.

Rivian’s problem, according to Consumer Reports, is less about any single model and more about a young company still learning to build at scale. “Continue to struggle to produce reliable vehicles” is how the organization described the brand’s trajectory, pointing to persistent quality and electric-powertrain issues even as Rivian has expanded production of its R1T truck and R1S SUV.

Lexus, Subaru, and Toyota Hold the Top Three

At the other end of the list, Lexus, Subaru, and Toyota “are again at the top of the Consumer Reports brand reliability rankings,” the organization said, a repeat of a pattern that has held for several consecutive years. Jon Linkov, the outlet’s autos editor, said the stakes for buyers go beyond a simple ranking number. “It’s enough of a headache to take an unreliable new car, SUV, or truck back and forth to the dealer for repairs while it’s under warranty,” Linkov said, making the case that reliability data belongs alongside price and features when someone is shopping.

Tesla’s Eight-Spot Climb

Tesla moved up eight spots to rank as the ninth most reliable automaker, its highest finish yet in the survey, according to Consumer Reports. The Model Y and the Model 3 both reached average-to-above-average reliability for the 2026 model year, a shift the organization credited to Tesla settling into its existing designs rather than introducing frequent hardware changes. The Model X remained the exception, still held back by its power-folding “falcon-wing” doors, a persistent problem area that has dogged the model since its original design.

Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ senior director of auto testing, tied Tesla’s improvement to a broader pattern the survey has picked up across the industry. “[Consumer Reports’] surveys continue to show that the slow and steady approach to vehicle redesigns pays dividends for reliability, while more aggressive changes and the introduction of new technologies often lead to setbacks,” Fisher said in the organization’s December report-card release. He added that newly introduced or newly redesigned vehicles are almost always the most problematic in their first model year, a pattern reliability-conscious shoppers can sidestep by waiting a model cycle or two.

Redesigns and Repair Trips Behind the Scores

The scoring system itself weighs up to 20 separate problem areas depending on powertrain type, from engine and transmission trouble to in-car electronics, EV charging systems, and hybrid battery components. Consumer Reports bases most predictions on a model’s reliability performance over the past three years unless it was recently redesigned, in which case brand-wide scores fill the gap until enough model-specific data accumulates.

Electrified vehicles as a category are still catching up to their gas-powered counterparts, Fisher said, describing the wave of newly introduced EVs and plug-in hybrids as an inevitable source of “growing pains” while the technology matures. He pointed to early signs that some electric models improve measurably as automakers iron out early defects, even as brands like Rivian and, in a different segment, Mazda’s plug-in hybrid SUVs continued to post below-average scores this cycle.

CNBC’s coverage of the same December release noted that Tesla’s climb came even as the company faced separate scrutiny over its Cybertruck, the one model in its lineup that continued to score below average and kept the brand out of the top five despite its overall gains. That split, a mass-market lineup improving while one flagship vehicle lags, is roughly the same story Consumer Reports tells about the industry’s bottom five, where a brand’s worst model can drag down an otherwise mixed record.

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

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