Someone just gave me the September 2018 issue of Consumer Reports (CR) magazine and I spotted this headline on the cover...
9 Terrific Used Car Picks
Well…of course I had to flip to that article to see if the Mirage shows up somewhere.
They had cars grouped by size category (full size, intermediate, compact, etc.) so I immediately found the sub-compact group. According to the CR "overall" score, out of the 12 subcompact cars they rated, the Mirage came in...last.
I've never had a ton of confidence in CR's automotive ratings because most of the reliable cars I've owned in the past usually turned up with CR reliability ratings much lower than I had personally experienced.
Here are the sub-compact ratings as shown in the issue of CR...
…and here’s how they rate each category…
A few observations to make...
Only 4 sub-compact cars have a good reliability rating, and the Mirage is one of them. Only the Yaris ranks higher in terms of reliability.
The Mirage has a poor Owner Satisfaction rating. Owner Satisfaction is based on whether or not you would definitely buy the car again. It’s interesting that half of the cars in this category have a poor Owner Satisfaction rating…and none have a good rating! That makes me wonder if people have their expectations too high for this class of vehicle…or maybe these were first-time owners of smaller cars.
The Mirage earned the second-lowest overall score (25) of any used car they rated. The lowest-score (24) honor goes to the Fiat 500.