It seems odd that Dodge has the top score here, with Toyota and Honda significantly below the industry average. This runs counter to my personal experience and general perceptions. I wonder if historically unreliable brands like Dodge are becoming more reliable than Japanese brands, or if this is related to how this survey is conducted?
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.
Because it's only problems within the first three months of ownership. Every car from a company can fall apart at the 90 day mark, but as long as they do ok in the first 90 days they get amazing marks. Toyotas and Hondas are known for hundreds of thousands of miles, but they get no points for that because the survey doesn't go far enough.
Cross check the OP ranking of 3 months of ownership against that of Consumer's Reports, which tracks car reliability over a decade. The two orderings differ enormously, likely because:
1) A car with fewer options/features has fewer parts that can fail.
2) Cheap cars are held to a lower standard than expensive cars.
You'll note that the OP's ranking puts cheap featureless cars at the top and expensive complicated cars at the bottom. This says little about brand quality and a lot about the fragility of complex systems.
Dodge has been making essentially the same models, unchanged, for a decade. They don't use fancy technology, which means less things to break. So despite a lackluster history of long-term reliability, they've had plenty of opportunity to get the initial build quality dialed in pretty well.
Personally, I think this is a measure of the expectations for the brands. Dodge and Kia offer entry-level vehicles at a really good price point.
Most people aren't buying Dodge vehicles for their luxury interiors or refined ride qualities. They're getting cheap kid haulers or affordable muscle cars.
