Lexus Retains Supremacy in Consumer Reports Auto Brand Report Card

For the third year in a row, Lexus has dominated Consumer Reports’ prestigious Car Brand Report Card, earning the coveted top marks among the world’s automakers.

The magazine’s staff crunched road test and reliability scores for 28 different automotive brands to figure out who was the best in terms of both performance and reliability.

The reliability scores come from their subscribers, who rated 1.1 million vehicles in the annual survey based on experiences with their own cars. These also combine with multiple scores from U.S. government and insurance industry safety tests, in addition to road tests by Consumer Reports staff.

“Think of reliability and road-test performance as a dating couple: often seen together, but not always,” write the editors. “That’s the way it can be with cars, too: A top score in our [road] tests doesn’t mean a car will be reliable; conversely, reliable cars can—and do—score poorly in our road tests.” That’s why the combination of the two types of scores is so important. “The overall scores show which automakers get it right in performance and reliability.”

Lexus scored 78 points overall, retaining its supremacy among the world’s top car brands, which isn’t surprising considering the lengths that Lexus goes to for quality. Every single Lexus LS engine is fired up on a test bench called the Assembly Balancer, and is personally inspected by a technician before it even gets near a vehicle. Then, the technician listens to it with a stethoscope – talk about bedside manner.

They also keep dust and other particles out of precision components, even giving workers “air showers” before they can go into the lab-like clean room where Lexus keeps the parts. They give each part and its airtight container multiple high-power vacuums before assembly.

But of course, a machine as exquisite as a Lexus also relies on the power of the human touch. Lexus boasts an elite team of ten masters who oversee different aspects of each vehicle. One of them is Toshikatsu Kuroyanagi, who manages quality at the liquid metal stage of the engine’s development. He ensures that the molten aluminum contains almost no gases, so it’ll be stronger when it’s formed into parts.

Quality starts with the raw materials – not to mention that every single part installer has to recite to a team of overseers all the things that could go wrong should he do his job haphazardly, so each technician understands the importance of even the smallest job. Safety? Check.

Lexus engineers also subject new vehicles to extreme trials in a special room designed to test the function of electronic systems with the interference of things like television waves, solar radiation, lightning, and temperatures ranging from 225 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 30.

While Consumer Reports has been rating vehicles individually since 1997, they only started rating auto brands as a whole in 2013. And every year they’ve done so, Lexus has dominated. Is anyone really surprised? So come on down to Lexus of Highland Park to test drive the most luxurious – and the safest Lexus models.