Range Rover named the UK’s most unreliable used car

Car warranty provider Warrantywise has named the UK’s ten most unreliable cars, with the last-generation Range Rover ranking last due to the SUV’s high repair frequency and high repair costs.

Warrantywise, which is also one of The Car Expert’s commercial partners, collected the data from 131,000 policyholders on vehicles up to ten years old – excluding very low volume models.

The data is then used to generate a reliability score for each car, and the cars are then ranked in the Warrantywise reliability index. Ranking these scores highlights what the company describes as the “problematic nature of luxury cars”, despite their high price tags.

As expensive models from the likes of Land Rover, Porsche, Bentley, BMW and Audi appear in the report’s ten-car unreliability list, Warrantywise CEO Lawrence Whittaker says that the general misconception that the more you pay, the more reliable the car will be, should be questioned by UK buyers.

“The opinion that they should be very reliable, for the price that customers pay for them, is quite a popular one, and this evaluation of our data is helpful for us to guide customers the right way when wanting to make a large purchase on a luxury car, like a Porsche.”

The ten most unreliable cars on UK roads

The report includes the highest repair fee that Warrantywise has paid out to policyholders that drive these cars, as well as a reliability score that is generated by the frequency of repair claims and how expensive these claims usually are.

Inevitably, as the data goes back up to ten years, some of the model names above may cross generations as all ten of the cars listed above had model changes within the last decade. However, Warrantywise was unequivocal that the wooden spoon specifically goes to the last-generation Range Rover.

Long known for potential reliability issues, it’s no surprise to see two Land Rover models appear in the list’s top three (or bottom three, depending on which way you look at it). This correlates with other reliability surveys and reports conducted over the years, as well as The Car Expert’s own data provided for our Expert Rating Index by MotorEasy.

In fact, the Warrantywise ratings for all ten of the cars above correlate strongly with our own data from MotorEasy, which reinforces the findings in this report.

Nine of the ten worst cars in Warrantywise’s index come from ‘premium’ brands, with three BMWs, two Land Rovers, two Porsches, a Bentley and an Audi. Only the Mazda CX-5 can really be considered as a car from a ‘mainstream’ car company.

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Additional reporting by Stuart Masson

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*Warrantywise is a commercial partner of The Car Expert. If you click through to their websites and proceed to purchase a used car warranty, we may receive a small commission. This does not affect the price you pay.