Shopping for a car means balancing the quality, features, performance, and comfort you want with the price and long-term ownership costs you can afford. The U.S. News Best Car for the Money awards put the spotlight on models that give you all of the above. The awards cover 14 different automotive classes, and each winner has the best combination of quality and value in their respective segments.
How We Measured Quality:
The U.S. News Best Car rankings were our starting point for the Best Car for the Money Awards. Our rankings are the best in the business when it comes to giving car shoppers clear, actionable, and unbiased advice. Based on the consensus opinion of the automotive press, and not just our own test drives and opinions, the rankings give you a birds-eye view of what professional automotive journalists think of a car, as well as insight into its safety and reliability.
How We Measured Value:
In addition to using data from our rankings to measure quality, we also teamed up with some outside partners to measure value. For pricing data, we turned to TrueCar, a company that tracks real-time transaction prices for new cars.
Because the best cars are good values over the long haul and not just the day you buy them, we worked with Vincentric to gather total cost of ownership data. This data takes factors like fuel, insurance, and repair costs over five years to give you a clear picture of how much owning a given car will cost you.
We combined the Vincentric data on ownership costs with the TrueCar pricing data to measure a vehicle's value.