How we test cars Our ratings explained Dec 2011

Best Buy, Worth a Look and Don't Buy, explained.

Look out for our Best Buy icon

The Which? verdict is our overall percentage score for the car, taking into account a variety of factors. This score can only be used to compare cars within the same class, as we rate sports cars differently from MPVs, for example. Primarily, it’s based on:

Road and lab test 80%
Safety 15%
Security 5%

However, cars are penalised if they have poor reliability or owner satisfaction in the Which? Car Survey – this can often mean the difference between a car being a Best Buy or not.

Best Buy

Put simply, these are the best cars you can buy, scoring very highly overall (75% or more for new cars; 70% or more for used cars). Our carefully chosen recommendations do well in our road test and lab test, as well as in safety and security assessments – they also receive good feedback from owners in our annual Which? Car Survey. They should be reliable and good to own for many years after leaving the showroom.

Worth A Look

Where you see a car flagged with Worth A Look, we think it’s worth a place on your car shortlist. Although it is a very good options, it falls short in one or two key areas, or sometimes it is simply too new for us to recommend without reservation – if we have no firm reliability information, for example. But if you have specific needs, such as a big boot, a Worth A Look car might suit you better than a Best Buy model.

Don’t Buy

As the name suggests, we strongly recommend you avoid cars flagged with the Don’t Buy icon. Usually, a Don’t Buy car has scored poorly in our road tests and also falls down badly on safety and reliability – there are several used cars that combine this unhappy ‘perfect storm’. New models tend to be named Don’t Buys only when safety is very poor – we think less than a four-star Euro NCAP crash-test rating isn’t good enough for a modern car.