Led By Prius Toyota Dominates Consumer Reports List of Ten Most Reliable 3-Year-Old Vehicles

Our favorite consumer-focused publication, Consumer Reports, has just announced its list of the ten most reliable three-year-old vehicles. Three Prius models take three of those ten spots.

Consumer Reports is all about value. The group recommends three-year-old cars because they have already passed through the steepest part of the depreciation curve. Also, leases tend to be about 3-years long, so the cars may well have been maintained by the local dealer selling them.

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Now, the good folks over at Consumer Reports deserve to earn a living, so we are not going to reveal the whole list, nor are we going to reprint all of the great things that they said about Toyota and the Prius. If you want to have every detail, please do what we do. Get an online subscription. You can subscribe right here. It's just $39 and if you want to go the full Monty, you can even get the print edition along with that buy spending $59.

OK, our Consumer Reports plug now done, let's talk about the Prius. The Prius V, Prius Hybrid, and also the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) all earn spots on the most dependable vehicles list. No other manufacturer has even two cars on the list. Unless you count Lexus. We consider Lexus a Toyota brand, so we don't. Only two manufacturers have any cars on the top ten list aside from Toyota.

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The Consumer Reports listing of most dependable cars is based not on the opinion of its staff. Rather, it is based on the responses to its member surveys of vehicle owners. We like that.

The Prius is not the overall top-rated most reliable car on the consumer Reports list. We are not going to tell you which car beat it, but we will give you a single hint. It rhymes with "Hamrey." We are not going to tell you which of the three Prii are the most dependable either. But we bet you can guess.

Check out the full list right here at this link to the Consumer Reports teaser page. If you are a member already, it should open right up for you.

John Goreham is a life-long car nut and recovering engineer. John's focus areas are technology, safety, and green vehicles. In the 1990s, he was part of a team that built a solar-electric vehicle from scratch. His was the role of battery thermal control designer. For 20 years he applied his engineering and sales talents in the high tech world and published numerous articles in technical journals such as Chemical Processing Magazine. In 2008 he retired from that career and dedicated himself to chasing his dream of being an auto writer. In addition to Torque News, John's work has appeared in print in dozens of American newspapers and he provides reviews to many vehicle shopping sites. You can follow John on Twitter, and connect with him at Linkedin.