https://electrek.co/2025/12/03/tesla-model-y-named-worst-car-for-reliability-germany-major-tuv-report/

Tesla has received a brutal reality check from Germany this week. The country’s closely watched TÜV Report 2026 has not only ranked the Tesla Model Y as the absolute worst car for reliability in its age group but noted that it has the highest defect rate of any vehicle tested in the last ten years.

The Model 3 didn’t fare much better, landing in the third-to-last spot with a 13.1% failure rate.

In EU, BYD is kinda good. My Atto3 has physical buttons for everything on top of the tablet for infotainment. So I don’t need to touch a screen to turn off the radio, or to activate the basic functions of the car.
They also offer a good deal of warranty (250k KMs on the battery pack) and they have high rates in EuroNCAP.
They are affordable, compared to other EVs and I love their aesthetics.

I’m satisfied with it and recommend to anyone here.

are there any that can’t be bricked remotely by the manufacurer?

2019 Nissan Leaf owner.

I had the ABS system die on me. On the highway, got a warning that there was no power with 84% battery remaining, told me to pull over as soon as possible. Car was full stopped on the side of the road. Replacement was about $3k.

I do not think that is a typical experience. Other than this incident the car has been fantastic.

I was run off the road, slid down and embankment, and had to drive another 1/2 mile (0,8km) off road to get to where I could drive back up the shoulder to the highway. Car had long grass stuck in everywhere but no damage other than cosmetic that we could tell. Granted this incident may have caused the eventual failure of the ABS unit.

Them’s my anecdotes.

I don’t think we have the data yet to answer the question, and then there’s the trap that past performance does not indicate future results.

All the manufacturers are designing and building new platforms with wholly new drivetrains. Some are recycling a lot of previous experience, and others are not (eg VW has a lot of experience with chassis and interior whereas BYD is new). But all cars are increasingly software dependent and manufacturers are assuming that they can fix bugs in production, so the prior experience is mostly limited to physical arena.

We can make assumptions and generalizations based on what the corporate culture has produced over the previous decades - Germans tend to be higher maintenance and require more precision in their repairs than other cars but they have good dynamics; Japanese cars are boring but require minimal maintenance; American cars are increasingly complex and leaning towards German levels of precision but with highly variable levels of reliability.

Overall though, electric vehicles have vastly fewer moving parts; the WeberAuto teardown of the Bolt EV drivetrain demonstrates it - I think there’s fewer than 10 moving parts including transmission, whereas there’s more than 10 parts in a single cylinder’s exhaust valve train in an ICE. So it comes down to the resilience of the electronics - is the heat managed properly, are the components sized adequately to handle the load over long term, are they waterproofed for the long term, vibration managed, etc. It’s hard to assess that.

I don’t like that all the new cars have touchscreens these days. Are there any with proper old-fashioned buttons?

Ioniq 5s are great, but they use a newer 800v e-gmp vehicle platform (along with other kia and Genesis EVs) which all have an iccu issue that’s been hard to pin down for Hyundai. Their other 400v based EVs like the Niro and Kona I heard are just fine.

The ICCU issue wouldn’t be a big deal of they had stock of them. I had the car at the shop for ~60 days waiting for the backordered part to arrive.

Otherwise the car has worked without issues.

Reliability might be a dream right now, Evs are still in rapid development.

I’m hoping Rivian turns out well, I’d like to consider the R2 as my next vehicle when the lease is up.