This Is The Car Company With Best Reputation

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 17, 8:36AM EDT

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This Is The Car Company With Best Reputation — © Harold Cunningham / Getty Images

Car company brand reputations are precious. Volkswagen found that out the hard way with an emission scandal that started in 2015 and affected over 10 million cars. VW lost billions of dollars, and sales crumbled, particularly in the U.S. On the other hand, Tesla’s reputation for quality and innovation has helped it become the most valuable car company in the world.

The RepTrak Company, which tracks brand reputations, recently released its Global 100. Its focus is on the companies with the best reputations in the world. On a scale of 1 to 100, the average score for the top brands was 74.9, up from 73.1 in 2020.

The group’s methodology is based on several factors:

Seven areas of your business drive your corporate reputation – the perception of your company’s Products & Services, Innovation, Workplace, Governance, Citizenship, Leadership, and Performance.

Among the 13 industries tracked, “Automotive and components” fell near the middle based on grades across all brands considered with an industry average of 73.0. “Consumer durables and apparel” was at the top with a rank across the category of 74.9. “Banks Diversified Financials Insurance” was at the bottom with a grade of 67.0.

Danish toy company LEGO took the top place among all brands. The top car brand was Ferrari, which also ranked third among all 100 brands. Compared to most global manufacturers, Ferrari is a tiny company. The first car with the Ferrari brand was produced in 1947. The company is publicly traded under the ticker symbol “RACE”. Ferrari sold 9,119 cars last year. In terms of contrast, the world’s largest car company–Volkswagen–sold over 10 million.

Ferrari’s place on the list is all the more extraordinary because it places ahead of The Walt Disney Compay, Microsoft, Google, and Nike.

The next car brand on the RepTrak list is BMW, in 23rd place, followed by Rolls Royce in 27th place, Volvo in 41st place, Tesla in 56th place, Toyota in 66th place, Daimler in 75th place, and Honda in 81st place. Notably, no U.S. car company makes the list.

Is there any lesson from the research? Only that a brand can be highly regarded, even it its sales are small.

Click here to see This Is America’s Slowest Selling Car

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.