Cars and Drivers

Fiat Falls to Bottom of Consumer Reports Auto List

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: March 17, 2016 10:55 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 11:50 am

The Fiat brand of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU) continues to struggle with U.S. sales. It may not be worth the effort to promote the brand at all. After a series of reports from J.D. Power and other research operations in which Fiat ranked at or near the bottom of the list, the prestigious Consumer Reports evaluation placed Fiat dead last in its brand evaluation.

Fiat Chrysler management may not have gotten the message that Fiat has little or no chance to survive as a viable brand in the American market.

Fiat sales have been obliterated over the first two months of the year. For the period, unit sales dropped 15% to 5,587. Without sales of the new Fiat 500X, which was not available last year, the number would have been much worse.

According to Consumer Reports:

Fiat is an enormous Italian conglomerate that includes all of the Chrysler brands in its portfolio. The Fiat brand was reintroduced in the U.S. in 2011 with the diminutive, retro-styled 500. Despite attractive looks and a fun driving experience, various crudities limit its appeal. Reliability has been dismal. The 500L proved unimpressive in our tests and for two straight years has garnered the lowest score of any new car in our reliability survey. The 500X SUV, which shares its platform with the Jeep Renegade, is stylish and has a number of available safety features but it had a rather mediocre performance in our testing.

To determine which brands consistently deliver cars that serve consumers well, we tabulate the overall score, road-test score, and predicted reliability results for each tested model of a brand. We then average those scores at the brand level. This average overall score is used to rank the brands.

Things could not get any worse for Fiat.