Every make on the road here, and what the record actually says

These pages cover the marques that account for most of what is parked on a British street, and the model lines under each one. A make page gives you the years each model was sold here, the body styles and fuel types it came in, and the typical annual road tax for a representative used example with the assumption behind that figure written out. What it does not give you is a reliability ranking, and that is worth explaining before you read any further.

Nobody publishes a per model reliability figure that could be cited. What circulates instead is survey data from panels that select themselves, warranty claim rates from companies with a product to sell, and averages built by choosing which years and which variants to count. Each of those choices moves the answer, and none of them is a measurement a reader could check.

A number printed beside a marque here would therefore be our arithmetic wearing somebody else's name. So the field does not exist, and the page says why rather than leaving a gap a reader might take for an oversight.

That still leaves the part most people came for. Road tax is the one running cost you can settle exactly before you buy, and it turns on the date printed on the V5C rather than the badge on the boot. Cars first registered on or after 1 April 2017 pay a flat standard rate whatever they emit. Cars from 1 March 2001 to 31 March 2017 pay by CO2 band, so two examples of one model can sit several bands apart on engine choice alone. Cars older than that pay by engine size. Two examples of the same model two years apart can cost very different amounts to keep on the road, and the model pages state which side of the line a given year falls on.

Which models appear here comes from the Department for Transport's licensed vehicle statistics, which count vehicles by make and generic model at the end of each quarter. New registration volumes and the best selling names come from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Every pound figure comes from the GOV.UK vehicle tax rate tables in force from 1 April 2026. Each make page repeats its own sources with the date each one applies from, so you can go and read the original.

If you already have a car in front of you, its own paperwork beats any average ever will. Invoices carrying a registration and a mileage describe that specific car rather than a statistic about cars that happen to share its badge.