2024 What Car? Reliability Survey: Britain's most and least reliable cars

In our annual Reliability Survey, we ask readers to rate the dependability of cars aged up to five years old. Here are the latest results based on the experiences of nearly 30,000 owners...

The most reliable cars - and the leastImage 1 of 21

There are thousands more electric vehicles (EVs) on UK roads now than this time last year, but are they the most dependable cars you can buy? After all, EVs are far less complex than hybrid cars and require less maintenance than petrol or diesel-engined models, so they ought to come out on top, right?

To answer this and other related questions, the annual What Car? Reliability Survey asks thousands of motorists to tell us if their cars have let them down during the past 24 months. The latest survey, conducted in association with MotorEasy, has gathered data from 29,967 car owners. As well as telling us if their cars had suffered any faults, they also told us how much each issue cost to fix and how long it kept their cars off the road. 

We only focus on cars up to five years old because that covers the minimum three-year new car warranty as well as another two years where faults are less likely to be fixed for free.

We start with the 10 most reliable cars, and then go onto the 10 least reliable: 

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