The 10 ‘Healthiest’ Cars of 2011

Old Reliables?

If you can’t decide between buying a used car and springing for a brand new one, you might want to consult CarMD’s 2011 Vehicle Health Index. The company, which manufactures an automotive diagnostic tool and software for car repair and maintenance, analyzed the data it had on roughly 136 million vehicles to determine which ones cost, both figuratively and literally, their owners the least amount of grief in 2011.

“The list is intended to help people put perception and public opinion aside when [car shopping],” says Art Jacobsen, CarMD’s vice president, adding that this is done by painting a concrete picture of which vehicles break down the least due to check engine-related problems. It also factors in how much these problem cost owners to fix when they do happen.

Using the data, CarMD was able to rank manufacturers in terms of cost and reliability. (You can find more on how they did here.) They were also able to rank specific makes and models. The overall ranking is a composite of two equally weighted scores: the repair incident rating, which was determined by the number of vehicle failures divided by the number of registered vehicles on the road, and the repair cost rating, which reflects the percentage of cost for repairs on that specific vehicle versus the average retail cost for the industry.  The lower the score is the more reliable a car is considered.

Read on to find out which vehicles came out on top once all the calculations were completed.

Photo Credit:   jerebu