What Car? Reliability Survey: Most and least reliable small cars

Small hatchbacks are often relied on by those with the tightest budgets, such as new drivers and students, and that means they need to keep soldiering on with no unexpected repair bills.

The small cars reported on in the latest survey weren't quite as bulletproof as those we were told about the year before: the score for the class is currently 94.3%, which is nearly one percentage point lower than in the 2023 survey. However, the small car class is still the highest scoring of all those we report on; it's nearly 7% better than electric cars, which only averaged 87.7%. 

To compile the What Car? Reliability Survey, conducted in association with MotorEasy, we asked thousands of car owners to give us the lowdown on how reliable their car had been over the previous 24 months.

First we asked them to tell us if the car had suffered a fault, and, if so, how much each problem had cost to put right and how long it had kept the car off the road. The responses for these two factors were weighted and added up for each make and model, enabling us to create a unique reliability rating for each. 

The latest What Car? Reliability Survey contains data on 199 models aged up to five years old from 31 different car brands.

The 2025 What Car? Reliability Survey is live, tell us about your car now

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