These Are America’s Longest-Lasting Car Brands

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 8, 7:36AM EST · Published Mar 6, 11:49AM EST

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These Are America’s Longest-Lasting Car Brands — © contrastaddict / iStock Unreleased via Getty Images

In general, cars and light trucks sold in the United States are better built and last longer. The period when cars built by Chrysler, Ford and General Motors were considered inferior to those made in Japan and Germany has passed. Widely followed car owner surveys from researchers J.D. Power and Consumer Reports support this.

Durability and quality seem to have extended the life of cars and light trucks. The average number of years an American car has been on the road is nearly 12, and that regularly rises. Some car brands might be labeled super-durable. These are ones that have been driven over 200,000 miles. Based on research from iSeeCars, only 1% of vehicles make it that far. They set out to find those brands most likely to reach 200,000 miles.

iSeeCars looked at 11.8 million preowned cars sold in 2020. They checked the odometers when they were listed for sale. The two longest-lasting car brands based on this analysis were Toyota and Honda. According to iSeeCars Executive Analyst Karl Brauer, “Along with setting the standard for reliability and durability, Toyotas and Hondas also have lower-than-average ownership costs. Owners are more likely to keep their vehicles on the road if they are performing well and don’t need costly repairs.”

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The percentage of Toyota’s that made it past the 200,000-mile yardstick was 2.0%. The Honda figure was 1.6%. It was followed by Chevy at 1.5%, Cadillac at 1.5%, GMC at 1.4%, Ford at 1.4%, and Ram at 1.1%. Bauer added, “Three General Motors brands all rank closely at the top, which shows that although their vehicles target different consumer types, they are consistently reliable.”

When Consumer Reports released its 2020 Auto Reliability Survey, the top three brands were Mazda, Toyota, and Lexus. It is unusual to see the small Japanese car company at the head of any such list. However, Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus have been in the top tier of many such rankings for decades.

The iSeeCars research only serves to prove something that the industry and public have known for a long time.

Click here to read about America’s longest-lasting car nodels.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.