Car Dependability Just Hit a Three-Year Low, and Software Is Why

J.D. Power’s 2026 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study came out in February, and it recorded the worst score since the study was redesigned in 2022. Cars owned for three years now average 204 problems per 100 vehicles, up from 202 the year before. That’s a small jump on paper, but it caps three straight years of the number getting worse, and J.D. Power’s own release points to one clear culprit: software.

The trend line is the story here: the industry average has climbed every year since 2024, and infotainment has stayed the single worst category the whole time, going from 49.1 to 56.7 problems per 100 vehicles. The one individual issue J.D. Power has tracked consistently across all three years, Android Auto and CarPlay connectivity, has climbed right alongside it, and it’s been the single worst problem in the entire industry for three years straight.

Worth flagging the timing here, since this study came out earlier in the year rather than being brand new. The reason it’s still worth talking about now is that a second J.D. Power report, the 2026 Initial Quality Study released over the summer, found the same pattern on brand-new cars. Overall quality jumped sharply this year, the best improvement since 1997, in every category except one. Infotainment got worse. Whatever’s going on with car software isn’t a one-off in a single report, it shows up consistently across J.D. Power’s research.

Where The Problems Are Actually Coming From

Infotainment is still the worst category in the 2026 dependability study, at 56.7 problems per 100 vehicles, ahead of exterior issues at 27.5. Premium cars, which tend to carry the most software and the most screens, jumped 8 points year over year to 217 problems per 100 vehicles. That’s a gap now 17 points wider than mass-market cars, a real reversal after two years of the gap holding roughly steady.

Over-the-air updates come out looking worse than most people probably expect too. Forty percent of owners said they’d received an update in the past year, and of those, only 27 percent said it actually improved their car, while 58 percent noticed no difference at all. Nearly two-thirds of all software updates in the study were delivered OTA, and those updates were tied to a nearly 14 percent rise in reported problems. Jason Norton, J.D. Power’s director of auto benchmarking, said automakers need to focus on delivering real improvements and explaining them clearly, rather than pushing updates just to push them.

A Live Issue In Europe Too

This particular study only covers the US, but the same brands selling infotainment-heavy cars there are selling nearly identical systems here. European regulators have already started pushing back on touchscreen-first interiors, something we’ve covered in our pieces on driver distraction and touchscreen car controls and the Euro NCAP protocol changes bringing physical buttons back. If software really is behind a lot of these long-term dependability problems, that’s one more reason to keep critical controls off a screen. It’s also worth separating infotainment glitches from mechanical reliability, since the two have very different causes, a distinction we go into in our piece on what actually breaks on an EV.

Featured Image: Stellantis