Consumer Reports lists used car Good Bets and Repeat Offenders
When it comes to used cars, every model available today has its good and bad units, so there's no way you can guarantee that a certain model will always make a good buy or a bad.
Having said that, it's also true that there are trends toward good and bad in used cars, and when it comes to tracking those trends there is probably no organization better than Consumer Reports Magazine.
In the process of putting together its Annual Auto Issue (which is available on newsstands now with a small Canadian Extra section) the U.S. publication studies the responses to its regular subscriber survey.
The latest survey drew about 675,000 responses from owners who reported on ''any serious problems they'd had with their cars, minivans, SUVs and pickups in the previous year.''
The full ratings for each model are included in the Annual Auto Issue or at www.consumerreports.org for subscribers.
As a teaser, Consumer Reports likes to list what it believes are the crème de la crème and the merde de la merde of used vehicles, based on the survey results. Again, it is possible that a particular unit of what Consumer Reports rates a crème model might be merde and a merde model might be a crème, so this is not a full-proof guide.
Whatever you're considering as a used vehicle, you are strongly advised to give it a serious examination.
But based on this survey and the surveys from years gone by, there are models that Consumer Reports lists as Good Bets and models that it lists as Repeat Offenders.
The list of Good Bets is as follows: