[DubiousPusher]

These surveys are a bit suspect. They tend to fluctuate a lot from year to year which makes little sense because car companies very minorly change their cars from one procution year to another. Major changes to design and construction only come every 5-10 years when a few models are often reintroduced together. Toyota ever ranking below any U.S. brand is almost hilarious but it will probably change on next year's survey. You can use these surveys to get a general idea of who is building more unbreakable cars by looking at them across multiple years.

Tesla though consistently ranks low on these kind of surveys. It's not really a surprise as small design or manufacturing issues take years to work out. There's a reason car companies that are very conservative with change like Toyota often top this list and companies that are pushing new technology into their cars frequently like BMW do not as well.

As an example, around 2000 BMW was one of the first companies to introduce variable valve timing on its whole line of cars. It was new and unsurprisingly VANOS seal failures soon became a frequent issue on higher milage cars. Basically every car has variable valve timing now and it's usually not an issue.

Edit: I use the term unbreakable instead of reliable because the kinds of issues that this survey tracks include things that aren't really about reliability in the traditional sense we think of it. If a company introcudes a particularly flimsy door handle and people are breaking them it comes up in this survey just as much as check engine lights. Minivans for example get docked a lot in surveys like this even though they are often well built because kids are hell on car interiors.