BYD Beats BMW, Mercedes and Audi on Reliability, New European Data Shows

I wrote about J.D. Power’s own dependability data recently, the study that tracks how many problems owners report on three-year-old cars in the US. That got me wondering how Chinese brands actually compare to European ones on the same measure.

Now, there isn’t one single European equivalent of J.D. Power’s PP100 score. What exists instead is a handful of independent surveys, run by different organisations in different countries, but they all point in a similar direction once you line them up.

The UK Has Two Independent Surveys

Auto Express runs the UK’s Driver Power survey every year, and it breaks reliability out as its own scored category. In the 2026 results, BYD scored 85.14%, landing it in the bottom ten of 30 manufacturers. MG did even worse with 83.94%, second only to Jeep as the least reliable brand in the whole survey.

Manufacturer	Driver Power reliability score	Overall manufacturer rank (of 30)
Mercedes	92.42%	1st
Volvo	91.43%	14th
Tesla	89.40%	3rd
BYD	85.14%	16th
Land Rover	84.39%	10th
Dacia	84.14%	30th
Cupra	84.00%	27th
MG	83.94%	29th
Jeep	81.68%	8th

Don’t skip past that last column, because it’s answering a different question entirely. Reliability is only one of ten categories Driver Power scores, and a brand’s overall ranking blends all of them together. Jeep finishes 8th overall despite the worst reliability score in the survey, because owners rate it highly for ride, handling and running costs. Citroën sits at a respectable 85.71% for reliability yet ranks 28th overall, dragged down by poor scores for ride comfort. MG’s problem is different: it scores badly on reliability specifically, not just on some unrelated category pulling its average down.

What Car?’s separate Reliability Survey backs this up independently. MG finished dead last among roughly 30 brands in 2024, at 76.9%, before climbing to 88.9% in 2025, a substantial jump. BYD doesn’t appear on this particular list at all, likely because too few UK owners had responded to be included, so MG is the only Chinese brand this survey scores.

Rank	Brand	Reliability rating
1	Honda	96.6%
6	BMW	94.6%
7	Tesla	94.5%
=24	Volkswagen	90.5%
26	Land Rover	90.4%
28	Fiat	90.1%
29	Nissan	89.9%
30	MG	88.9%

If you break MG down to individual models, the picture gets more interesting: the MG5 EV scored 94.1%, one of the more reliable EVs in the whole survey, while the MG4 was the single worst-performing EV model in 2024 at just 63.8% before improving. That’s two cars from the same brand, built and sold at the same time, but landing at opposite ends of the entire reliability chart. Weird.

A Ten-Country Study Tells the Same Story, at a Bigger Scale

It would be easy to write the UK numbers off as a local quirk, except Altroconsumo, Italy’s equivalent of consumer bodies like Which? in the UK or Test-Aankoop in Belgium, surveyed more than 53,000 drivers across ten European countries (Italy, Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain) between May and July 2025, and published a reliability index running from 0 to 100.

Brand	Reliability score
Tesla	89
BYD	89
BMW	87
Mercedes	84
Audi	84
Volkswagen	82
Volvo	82
Lynk & Co	76
MG	72
Land Rover	64

In this survey, BYD matches Tesla and beats BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Volkswagen and Volvo outright. MG, meanwhile, comes second-to-last of every brand covered, ahead of only Land Rover. Lynk & Co, another Geely-owned Chinese brand, doesn’t do much better at 76.

That’s the same split the UK data showed, just confirmed on a much larger sample and across more countries. Whatever’s driving the difference between BYD and MG, obviously it isn’t “Chinese cars” as a category.

Unfortunately, Germany Doesn’t Have This Kind of Data Yet

The German equivalent doesn’t exist yet in any usable form. ADAC’s Pannenstatistik and the TÜV Report are Germany’s two big reliability benchmarks, but both need years of a model being on German roads in real numbers before they can score it. Chinese brands have only reached meaningful registration numbers in Germany over the past couple of years, so BYD, MG and Nio still fall below that threshold, and newer arrivals like Leapmotor will wait even longer before they get a line of their own in either report. ADAC does publish one relevant figure: EVs in general break down at a rate of 3.8 per 1,000 vehicles, against 9.4 for petrol and diesel. But that’s a powertrain comparison, though, not a brand or origin one.

Why One Chinese Brand Beats BMW and Another Barely Beats Land Rover

The pattern across both the UK and the ten-country study points out that this is about how each company is run, and not where it’s based. I’ve written before about the brutal price war playing out in China’s domestic EV market, where over 100 manufacturers are fighting for share and some are cutting development timelines to a fraction of what a traditional car needs. BYD makes its own batteries and much of its own electronics, even under all that domestic pressure. That kind of manufacturing scale and vertical control tends to show up as consistency in the field. MG’s parent company SAIC has gone a different way with its budget-focused models, leaning harder on rapid cost-cutting to hit UK and European price points. The reliability data reflects that choice, not Chinese manufacturing in general.

Infotainment and software remain the single worst category in every major dependability study I’ve looked at, whether the brand is European, American or Chinese. MG owners’ most common complaints are sat-nav glitches, connectivity drops and screen freezes. The same issues drag down plenty of legacy European brands too. I looked at this from a different angle in my piece on touchscreen controls and driver distraction, where software decided whether a car’s tech felt like a benefit or a liability.

Don’t Buy the Badge, Buy the Model

Don’t buy a Chinese EV because it’s Chinese, and don’t avoid one for the same reason. The data doesn’t support either instinct. Instead, check the specific model’s own reliability record, not just the brand’s, because MG alone shows how far that can swing between one car and the next wearing the same badge. BYD’s current reliability scores put it in the company of Tesla and ahead of several premium European names. MG’s put it near the bottom of every list it appears on, even as specific models like the MG5 buck that trend entirely. BYD and MG come from the same country and face the same broad market pressures at home, and yet one is thriving on this measure and the other is struggling.

FAQ

Are Chinese EVs more reliable than European EVs?
It depends entirely on the brand: BYD scores as well as Tesla and better than BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Volkswagen in Europe’s largest independent reliability survey, while MG scores near the bottom of the same list, just ahead of Land Rover.

Is MG rated a reliable car?
MG has finished at or near the bottom of both UK Driver Power and What Car? reliability surveys, and second-to-last in the pan-European Altroconsumo study.

What is the most common reliability problem in Chinese EVs?
Infotainment and connectivity issues, the same category that dominates complaints in European and American dependability studies too.

Featured Image: BYD