Which car brand would you say is the best on the market today?
The answer to that question will be as varied as car buyers themselves. Some people judge brand based on style, while others make it all about reliability. The customer experience will surely rank high on anybody’s list of best car brands, while a reputation for high performance or stellar fuel economy may be a priority for others.
To name a “best” brand is certainly a subjective effort. Anyone can apply a custom set of qualifiers and name their favorite brand as the best on the market.
Consumer Reports tackled the project by naming the brands that exhibit high-level performance across their lines. According to that standard, CR says Audi is the best brand available.
In its rankings, Audi took the top spot, while Porsche, BMW, Lexus, and Subaru rounded out the top five.
CR made it very clear that corporate behavior didn’t factor into the rankings, which in my humble opinion puts an asterisk next to the entire list. A brand is perhaps best represented not just by the cars it builds, but by how a corporation treats its employees, customers, and even the environment surrounding us all.
The quote, “The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching,” applies to corporations too.
That would move Audi, and corporate parent Volkswagen, to the bottom of my list.
Consumer Reports used basic qualifiers such as road manners, reliability, and overall satisfaction to gauge its favorite brands. Audi is the brand with the highest scores across all model lines, and therefore the winner.
To arrive at the rankings, we averaged the Overall Scores for new cars from every major automotive brand based on the vehicles we have purchased and tested, then we ranked them. Brands with just one tested model were omitted.
So really, CR‘s list is just a ranking of its reviewers’ favorite automakers, not a representation of America’s favorite car brand.
Which makes us wonder:
What’s your favorite car brand and why?
-tgriffith
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