What are Top luxury car brands?

Following close behind Lexus, which scored 79, are two rivals: Acura, the luxury division of Honda, and Audi, Volkswagen’s luxury brand.

With models that are reliable, well-finished, and somewhat sporty, Acura earned a score of 75. Audi came in at 74, thanks to its cars’ well-crafted interiors, nice handling, and good gas mileage from its range of modern, efficient engines. Plus, Audi models have shown improved reliability.

Our brand report cards are intended to show which brands are making the best all-around vehicles, based on how their models perform in our comprehensive road tests and how they rate in reliability based on subscribers telling us their experiences with 1.1 million vehicles.

We calculate each brand’s overall score using an equally weighted composite of our road-test and reliability scores for each of its models that we’ve tested and for which our subscribers have provided reliability data in our Annual Auto Survey. To be included, each brand needs at least three models for which we have test and reliability data. This year we don’t have report cards for Fiat, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Mini, Mitsubishi, Porsche, Ram, Scion, Smart, and Tesla because we have too few currently tested models from those makes or we lack sufficient reliability data to make a valid comparison.