European brands lag behind their Far Eastern counterparts in reliability stakes

New figures released by warranty specialist Warranty Direct show European brands are most likely to have problems. The figures are based on cars aged between 3 and 8 years old with a sample size of 50,000 live policies.  The glimmer of good news is that the claims aren’t as large, so they are cheaper to fix.

Land Rover has been named as the least reliable brand with a 55% chance of a fault in 12 months while Honda is the most reliable with a relatively miserly 9% chance of a fault in 12 months.

What may be of more interest to those looking for a trend in the statistics is the level of dominance that Japanese and Korean brands have. Every make in the top ten is produced in the Far East with Skoda and Smart in 11th and 12th respectively.

The second part of the survey relates to repair cost. Unsurprisingly Porsche are bottom of the table with an average repair cost of £689.99, Fiats are the least expensive to repair with an average cost of £241.62.

In general the European cars are less expensive to repair and this is in part due to the problems they suffer from. A third of faults on European cars are electrical while owners of Lexus, Subaru and Suzuki cars report problems with axle and suspension items.