Consumer Reports Picks Top Car Brand for 2021: Congrats to Mazda

Consumer Reports has published its annual report card rating automotive brands and their lineups, and the winner this year is Mazda.

In ranking brand performance, the magazine’s experts looked at a number of factors, including road-test performance, predicted reliability, owner satisfaction, safety and environmental friendliness. CR points out that this year there was substantial reshuffling in the rankings in comparison with last year, and attributes a large part of that to fluctuations in predicted reliability, which can be pretty wild.

Honda and BMW were notable gainers this year, with Honda jumping up 10 position to take 5th spot overall, and BMW climbing from 8th to the second position. Chrysler and Buick also made the climb into the top 10. Going in the other direction were Genesis and Lincoln, again mostly because of poor scores in the predicted reliability data; Genesis finished in 15th spot with an overall score of 66 (identical to Tesla, for those who are curious about how Elon Musk’s creations fared), while Lincoln (53) plummeted to 28th spot.

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One interesting element looked at by CR has to do with environmental friendliness; the organization determined how many of each brand’s tested models constitute what it calls Green Choices. In this area, Mazda actually earned a big fat 0, none of its models being considered green enough to merit the title. In contrast, 12 of Toyota’s 19 models tested earned that honour; no other brand came close.

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