America’s Best Car Brand

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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America’s Best Car Brand

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Among several prominent car ranking studies, the Consumer Reports auto brand car ratings stand out. For its “Which Car Brands Make the Best Vehicles?” report, it looks at 32 brands based on road tests, reliability, safety and satisfaction. (Here are the best- and worst-built cars in America.)
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The test looks at 50 aspects of new cars. These include braking, handling and crash test results. “Green cars” receive their own ratings. They are a universe that includes “low-emitting” cars. Marta Tellado, president and CEO of Consumer Reports, commented, “This year, auto brands are offering more choices with fewer emissions. Everybody should have access to safe, affordable vehicles that go further on a gallon of gas, or no gas at all.”
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Brands on the list were rated zero through 100. The top brand was the German luxury brand BMW, which routinely holds the luxury car sales market share lead with Mercedes and Toyota’s Lexus. BMW received a grade of 81. Lexus was in fourth place among the 32 brands measured with a rating of 77. One mass-market brand placed second. Subaru had a rating of 79, which tied it with Mini. Subaru routinely shows up at or near the top of car brand lists.
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Mass market brands Toyota (rating 76) and Honda (77) were among the top six, showing that luxury cars do not always have an advantage.
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BMW is among the most successful and oldest car companies in the world. Last year was an example of its global success. The BMW Group reported a significant growth in revenues (€142,610 million/+28.2%), group earnings (€23,509 million/+46.4%) and net profit (€ 18,582 million/+49.1%) last year. In a year when many car companies struggled financially, BMW posted extraordinary results.

BMW sold 332,248 vehicles in the United States last year. Its reputation for quality almost certainly helped that.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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.

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