The Honda Accord, has been voted as the most reliable car in the UK in this years Fleet News FN50 awards, whilst Honda also won the award overall as the top car manufacturer.
In a separate survey, Ford picked up top honours in the light commercial sector with a clean sweep for both manufacturer and vehicle, with its Connect taking pole position and its bigger brother the Transit taking the second step on the podium.
Fleet News is the most well respected fleet publication there is and its FN50 survey takes its data from the UK’s top leasing companies. The survey is considered as one of the most significant around as it’s not based on opinion, but covers real life experiences of a huge range of different models from many of the major car manufacturers. For the car part of the survey, FN50 considered a sample of over 700,000 vehicles and looked at just over 900,000 vehicles when arriving at its manufacturer award.
The awards look at actual operating experience, including the number of breakdowns per 100 of each type of model, so are some of the most credible results you will ever find.
For the light commercial vehicles, in a separate survey they looked at over 116,000 vehicles. Ford took the honours as the most reliable manufacturer and the two top spots for its little & large Transit twins.
The top ten cars for reliability were.
1) Honda Accord
2) Toyota Avensis
3) Volkswagen Jetta
4) Honda Civic
5) Mini
6) BMW 3 Series
7) Ford Mondeo (old shape)
8) Audi A4
9) Mazda 6
10) Peugeot 207
In the manufacturer’s awards, the top ten were
1) Honda
2) Toyota
3) BMW
4) Volkswagen
5) Audi
6) Ford
7) Lexus
8) Mazda
9) Mercedes Benz
10) Nissan
With cars from around 60 manufacturers available in the UK, clearly, not everyone can make the top 10, but in terms of fleet cars or cars for use in your business, it’s surprising the big names of Citroen, Vauxhall, and Renault don’t figure in the top 10.
One point of caution however. These awards are put together from data provided by fleet companies and therefore represent what in the main, companies choose as fleet vehicles. These vehicles may not be typical of what you might choose to have yourself. I am sure you can imagine, there will be a lot more VW, Toyota or Ford operated by fleet companies than there will be Jaguars or Porsche’s and the fact they don’t figure in the list, does not mean they are unreliable.
Top five vans were:-
1) Ford Transit Connect
2) Ford Transit
3) Volkswagen Transporter
4) Mercedes Benz Vito
5) Mercedes Benz Sprinter
Top five van manufacturers were:-
1) Ford
2) Vauxhall
3) Volkswagen
4) Mercedes Benz
5) Citroen.
