The 10 Best Car Brands of 1985

Abstract

This page provides a ranking of the Top 10 car brands sold in North America between late 1984 and 1989. The statistics used in the computations for rating and ranking the brands are those found within the April 1985 issue of Consumer Reports.

The 10 Best Car Brands of 1985 

This page provides a ranking of the Top 10 car brands sold in North America between late 1984 and 1989.

The statistics used in the computations for rating and ranking the brands are those found within the April 1985 issue of Consumer Reports. The section providing the necessary statistics is CR’s reliability charts. Reliability is defined by the magazine as the infrequency of serious problems, which it measures annually by a subscriber survey.

This ranking of the car brands is based on the average of the overall reliability ratings of each brand’s models. It provides a measure of how well a brand’s models performed over the entire model-quality spectrum.

Brand Quality by the Average of Overall Reliability Ratings: The Top 10

To compute brand-quality ratings and assemble a brand-quality ranking using Consumer Reports’ overall reliability ratings, a number is associated with each rating. A +1.0 is ascribed to a rating of Much Better Than Average, a +0.5 to a rating of Better Than Average, a 0 to a rating of Average, a -0.5 to a rating of Worse Than Average, and a -1.0 to a rating of Much Worse Than Average. Then an average is taken over all of the brand’s model years and models offering an overall reliability rating. CR’s 1985 overall reliability ratings are found in the Trouble-Index row of its reliability charts.

For this measure of quality, the range is from -1.0 (the worst possible) to +1.0 (the best possible).

The 10 best car brands by this set of computations, together with their quality ratings, are given in the bar graph below. Only those brands with at least 5 overall CR reliability ratings are included.

 

 

 

From this graph, it may be seen that the Top 10 brands by overall reliability include Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Mazda, Honda, Nissan’s Nissan, Subaru, Nissan’s Datsun, BMW, Volvo, and Ford’s Lincoln.

Important Point: If the Mitsubishi-built models are removed from Chrysler’s Plymouth brand and their reliability ratings are included in the computations of the Mitsubishi average, Ford’s Lincoln drops from the Top 10 and Mitsubishi places 7th following Subaru.

To view the graphs showing the 1985 ratings and rankings of all brands, visit http://carsoninfo.net/AllCarBrandsof1985.aspx .

With regard to the above link to Cars on Info, the host is Microsoft; consequently, if you click the link, you will likely need to click the refresh button once or twice to access the linked page.