Reliability Plaudits For Mercedes

(Monday 24 September 2012)

The 2006-2009 Mercedes-Benz E-Class has been placed at the top of a reliability survey of three- to six-year old cars conducted by Warranty Direct, with a failure incident rate of just 10%.

There are a couple of things to note before we go any further. First, the data for the survey comes only from claims made in the last 12 months by Warranty Direct customers (20,000 of them in this case, which seems large enough at least to hint at a national trend), and second, only European brands were involved, as cars with Far Eastern badges tend to swamp this kind of research when they're included.

The E-Class was followed by two current models, the Skoda Fabia and smart fortwo, on 15% each, and the Volvo C70 on 16%. The remainder of the top ten consisted of the '03-'09 Renault Scenic, the recently discontinued Peugeot 207, the Volvo S80, the Citroen C3 Pluriel, the MINI One and the '06-'09 SEAT Ibiza, whose incident rate was 21%.

Right at the bottom of the list is the 2004-09 Land Rover Discovery, with an incident rate of 85%, followed by the '03-'10 Bentley Continental GT (78%) and last-generation Renault Espace (76%).

Warranty Direct has also published the largest claim made for each model in the past year. The Fabia easily leads the field here with £180.35, while the E-Class's £637.22 seems reasonable considering the original price of the car. £1992.70 for the Peugeot 207 is rather more worrying.

The worst figure is a whopping £10,120.39 for the BMW 7-Series, followed by £6400.27 for the Range Rover Sport. Those are, however, freakish numbers, or "outliers" as the statistical bods call them; apart from those, only the Mercedes-Benz SL and Saab 9-3 exceeded £3000.