According to Consumer Reports the Fiat 500L is the most unreliable car this year. IIRC the Mini Cooper was on the list last year. Two cars high school girls like. I’ve had pretty good luck with what CL says.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/11/06/consumer-reports-reliablity-20–worst/75275986/
One of our cars is a Mini Cooper. There are a ton of them in our area. It is one of my husband’s cars and of the probably ten people we know that have one, all are adults and mostly men. :). It’s the second one my H has had and no problems at all. They are fun cars to drive.
We learned the hard way not to buy a car when its a brand new model or a complete overhaul of an existing model. Wait a year or two for the kinks to get worked out.
I have two 2008 Subaru Outbacks, and just got a similar letter for both of them. No parts available–we’ll let you know–oh, and don’t let anybody ride in the front passenger seat. What? I’m pretty mad about this, and I was just about to buy a new car, and was leaning toward Subaru. Now I’m not so sure.
The Takata airbags are in tons of cars. We got a similar notice for two of our Hondas.
I’d rather get the notice…than have someone get hurt.
It’s not just Subaru. There are only a few airbag suppliers in the world and most of supply is going to new car manufacturing. There isn’t capacity in the production process to produce all these airbags needed for replacement.
@hunt:
The lack of parts is not subarus fault, when I got the initial notice on my Honda (a 2002 Odyssey), they didn’t have the parts for it, the dealer got me in as soon as they had them. The real problem was/is Tanaka, they covered up that there were problems, and also dragged their feet on letting the companies know what was affected, then had a hard time supplying inflators that were not defective, they had to change their design then had to manufacture literally millions of units…not to mention I suspect they weren’t all the same, so they had to make them for models going back many years. So much for the ‘relationship’ model that lean manufacturing is based in, you get a bad company, you get a bad company.
The name of the company that made the airbags is Takata, not Tanaka.
anything made by VW.>>>>>>
I second this
That’s a shame. I’ve always like the GTI and would love to have one, but can never justify the cost and the poor reliability record.
My Audis have given me nothing but fantastic driving experiences. No maintenance/reliability issues at all.
We bought a Nissan NV cargo van last year for the business. It’s what my husband drives most of the time. I am not a big fan. It has already been in for a couple of warranty issues. My ex had two Pathfinders and both had issues…pretty major issues. And yet we have friends that just love their Nissans. To each his own, I guess
Our crap cars were Chevrolet and Ford. Since then have only bought Honda/Toyota/Acura/Subaru and have not had any issues. My car officially has 150,000 miles on it and I still love it 11 years later. But when it’s time to get a new car, I will only go with one of the ones in the second list. When I got my Chevrolet and then Ford, we were heavily influenced by my parents suggestions - thankfully we grew up and learned not to go with their recommendations.
@teriwtt , back in the mid-eighties, my then fiancé was set to buy himself a little Honda. He did his homework and the car had all the right reviews and reputation but his parents talked him into buying a Pontiac because it supported domestic auto production.
It was nothing but a piece of crap that has issue after issue. We couldn’t wait to get rid of it once we war married. I will never forget driving down the road with less than 30,000 miles on it and having the timing belt fail and make the car inoperable.
That was the end of being pressured into buying a car for the sake of it being American
That’s almost exactly what happened to me at 30,000 miles - driving down the road in my Chevette and the transmission basically fell out on the pavement. Of course my parents (who insisted on buying this particular car for me) were not the ones who ended up footing that bill. The only good thing was that I was less than a mile from home as this was way before the days of cell phones! As I look back now at all their car choices over the years, I remember lots of time spent in the shop and almost always trading in a car around 75,000 miles. Like I said, I still love my Acura at 150,000 miles, despite knowing I’m missing out on lots of new technology. I’ve had two somewhat major (around $500) repairs and that’s it. One of those was the bluetooth the past week that ran around $425.
Well, nowaday’s it’s getting harder to figure out what’s an American car. Most Hondas are made in Ohio with mostly American content. Same for many Toyotas, that are assembled in Ontario, Canada with mostly North American components. GM manufactures a lot in Canada. Chrysler is an Italian company with much of its manufacturing in Mexico. Hyundai has a plant in Alabama. Nissan in Tennessee. Subaru in Indiana.
For me, it’s not necessarily where the car is made any longer, due to the reasons you list above, but where the company originated from. At least for the time being, most of the cars that initially had been engineered and made in Japan are far superior. Doesn’t mean some of them aren’t made here now.
Yes-it’s the design and engineering that makes a car what it is, rather than where the parts are made or assembled…
^^I disgree. There are some fairly significant cultural differences for the workers assembling the cars, there are some sourcing issues with the metals (we had a recall on a part because the source piece from China failed), and there are differences in assembly process with the level of attention to detail and failure rate of both the robotics and the assemblers. People Product Process-you have to have all three working really well to consistently produce a well-made car.
When Mercedes first started producing their ML SUV’s and the R class hearses (excuse me, station wagons) in Alabama, the reliability was INSANELY poor. Their people had been trained in American factories with levels of quality control appropriate to Pontiac, et all. It was a few years before the MB corporate figured out what was going on and re-trained the people to MB standards of assembly and manufacturing.
It’s one of the reasons the South Korean manufacturer Hyundai has become more reliable than Honda in the past few years (I’m not a fan of Hyundais because I think they’re boring and they steal body designs, but I give them major props for ALSO copying the process of the Japanese car manufacturers and figuring out how to do it better than Toyota and Honda, now).
I spend a lot of time researching cars, can you tell? 
DS bought a mini cooper. Its had issues.