Thirty-five 2025 electric vehicles with enough reported-failure history to rank, each scored against its own class and model year — not against each other.
October 2026 · 2025 model year · 4 min read
Thirty-five 2025 electric vehicles carry enough reported-failure history to be ranked against their own classes. Toyota bZ4X leads them — and the spread between the best and worst of them is 4.7×, against 2.4× across gasoline vehicles of the same year. Which EV you buy matters far more than which gasoline car you buy.
Every vehicle below is scored against its own class and model year, so the Tesla Model Y competes with mid-size SUVs rather than with other EVs. Frequency is measured separately from cost, because a car that needs attention often but cheaply is a different proposition from one that rarely breaks and then ruins your month.
Combined index — one number accounting for both how often a vehicle needs fixing and how costly those fixes are, measured against the class average for the same model year. 1.00× is typical; lower is better. The matrix further down plots the two separately.
Mid-Size SUV · #16 of 66 in class · combined 0.71× · frequency 0.65× · severity 0.76× · open in the lookup →
Toyota's first serious EV wins on the cost axis as much as the frequency axis — fix severity of 0.76× is the lowest in the top five. It is also the quietest story here: 15,609 sold, against 361,197 for the Model Y.
Mid-Size SUV · #17 of 66 in class · combined 0.72× · frequency 0.35× · severity 1.09× · open in the lookup →
0.35× the class frequency — the lowest in the top five, on 51,651 sales. Its early years were poor; the EV SUV shortlist has the four-year trajectory.
Mid-Size SUV · #18 of 66 in class · combined 0.72× · frequency 0.49× · severity 0.95× · open in the lookup →
The highest-volume EV on the planet, and still 18th of 66 mid-size SUVs. Volume usually works against a score here — more cars on the road means more reports — which makes the top third notable.
Executive Car · #5 of 12 in class · combined 0.87× · frequency 0.59× · severity 1.15× · open in the lookup →
The one small-class result here: 12 executive cars, so 5th place is a narrower claim than 18th of 66. Fix severity of 1.15× is above average — Porsche parts prices.
Executive Car · #6 of 12 in class · combined 0.89× · frequency 0.80× · severity 0.98× · open in the lookup →
Fix frequency 0.80× on 7,392 sold, and the clearest improvement curve of any electric sedan — the sedan shortlist charts it year by year.
Every combined score above folds two measures into one. This chart pulls them back apart — fix frequency across the bottom, fix severity up the side, bubble size for units sold, good corner bottom-left. That separation is the point: two vehicles can share a combined score and sit in completely different places here.
The two halves of the combined score, plotted separately: left is less often, down is less costly. Each EV is scored against its own class, not against other EVs.
Look up any EV →The same chart exists for every class and model year back to 2004, with the vehicle you are researching highlighted in it. Open the lookup →
Pull back from the top five and the 2025 picture is unflattering. The median electric vehicle sits in the 24th percentile of its class. The median gasoline vehicle sits in the 58th. That is not a small difference, and no amount of selecting the best five hides it.
But the two indices split cleanly, and that is the useful finding. Electric vehicles draw issue reports about 3.9× as often as gasoline vehicles of the same year. When something does go wrong, it costs almost exactly the same — median fix severity 1.00× for electric against 1.00× for gasoline.
Read that as: the EV reliability problem of 2025 is a lot of small faults — screens, charging handshakes, door handles, software — not catastrophic drivetrain failures. Hybrids, worth noting, have closed the gap entirely: median 54th percentile against gasoline's 58th.
One caveat worth stating plainly. This measures reported issues per vehicle sold. Electric vehicles are newer, their owners skew early-adopter, and software faults that a gasoline car would never generate a report for are counted here. Some of the EV frequency gap is almost certainly reporting behaviour rather than hardware. The severity figures, which barely move between powertrains, are the harder number.
The Subaru Solterra posted 0.50× and the Mercedes-Benz EQE posted 0.84× — both better than our number one. Neither cleared the pipeline's bar for a class rank at this volume of reported history, and we do not publish a placing we cannot stand behind.
The Toyota bZ4X, with a combined index of 0.71× against its class average and a rank of #16 of 66 mid-size SUVs of the same model year. Ford Mustang Mach-E and Tesla Model Y are within a rounding error of each other behind it.
On reported failures per vehicle sold, yes — clearly. The median 2025 EV draws issue reports 3.9× as often as the median 2025 gasoline vehicle and sits in the 24th percentile of its class against the 58th. But fix severity is nearly identical (1.00× against 1.00×), so the issues are more numerous rather than more serious.
The 2025 Model Y ranks #18 of 66 mid-size SUVs — the top third of its class — with a combined index of 0.72×. It is the third-best-scoring 2025 EV we can rank and by far the highest volume, at 361,197 sold.
The bottom of the 2025 electric field is occupied by the Volvo EX90 (#42 of 42), the Polestar 3 (#66 of 66) and the Hyundai IONIQ 5 (#65 of 66). Two of 2025's five best-selling EVs rank in the bottom three of their own classes — the best-sellers article covers that in full.
Failure reports filed with NHTSA — submitted by vehicle owners and repair shops alike — weighted against US sales volumes so a high-volume model is not penalised for selling well, then benchmarked within segment and model year. Full methodology.
All 12 systems scored, the whole class plotted, and a downloadable report for any model year — 6,000+ vehicles in the dashboard.
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