1975 Auto Brand Quality Ratings and Rankings
by James Bleeker

Content Summary

This page provides one ranking of the brands of automobiles sold in North America from model year 1971 to 1974. Other web pages of this section provide two rankings; however, the numbers required for the second ranking are not available, that is, they do not exist.

The statistics used in the computations for rating and ranking the brands are those found within the April 1975 issue of Consumer Reports. The section providing the necessary statistics is CR's reliability charts. Reliability is defined by the magazine as the infrequency of serious problems, which it measures annually by a subscriber survey.

The ranking of the car brands is based on the average of the overall reliability ratings of each brand's models. It provides a measure of how well a brand's models performed over the entire model-quality spectrum.

1975 Auto Brand Quality by the Average of Overall Reliability Ratings

To compute brand-quality ratings and assemble a brand-quality ranking using Consumer Reports' overall reliability ratings, a number is associated with each rating. A +1.0 is ascribed to a rating of Much Better Than Average, a +0.5 to a rating of Better Than Average, a 0 to a rating of Average, a -0.5 to a rating of Worse Than Average, and a -1.0 to a rating of Much Worse Than Average. Then an average is taken over all of the brand's model years and models offering an overall reliability rating. CR's 1975 overall reliability ratings are found in the Overall-Record row of its reliability charts.

For this measure of quality, the range is from -1.0 (the worst possible) to +1.0 (the best possible).

The quality ranking of the car brands by this set of computations, together with their quality ratings, is given in the bar graph below. Only those brands with at least 5 overall CR reliability ratings are included.

The Bar Graph of 1975 Brand Quality

In the graph that follows, the order of the car brands is with the best on top.

Summary and Analysis

Some interesting points exhibited by the graphs above are:

1. General Motors' Oldsmobile (off-loaded in 2004) and Buick brands are rather average; GM's other two listed brands, Chevrolet and Pontiac (off-loaded in 2009), are below average.

2. Ford Motor Company's Lincoln and Mercury brands are above average; Ford's Ford brand is average.

3. Mercedes-Benz, which placed first, displayed its engineering excellence again in model years 1971 to 1974. Nissan's Datsun placed second.

4. By 1975, Toyota Motor Corporation's Toyota brand had already achieved Top 3 status.

Additional Resources

To view the graphs showing the 1975 ratings and rankings of the manufacturers of automobiles, click Go.

For a Google Knol that summarizes the changes in auto-brand and auto-manufacturer ranking by these quality measures from 1990 to 2010, click Go.

AutoOnInfo.net: The auto-quality website with the Open Directory Cool Site Award.