Most reliable new full-size trucks plus expected lifespan

Want to buy one of the most reliable new full-size trucks? Here’s data on which ones are the best as well as how long they are expected to last. Reliable new full-size trucks This list from the team over at iSeeCars.com created this list and ranked each full-size truck by average list price, expected lifespan in years, price per year and compared to average. They “analyzed the prices of over 3.8 million new cars sold in July – December 2024 and the odometer readings of over 368 million used cars from its Longest Lasting Cars Study. The average list price of […] (read full article...)

Awesome, thank you for the data!

Could you do the same for mid size and heavy duty truck please?

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Data like this is always tough to make sense of. Sure, I get the Tundra on top and the Ram on bottom for total lifespan. I'm more surprised by the average list price between the two. Are the Tundra's truly listed below the Ram pricing? Or is it because Ram makes more higher end models than Toyota so the average is skewed? Or is the Toyota truly priced lower which negates the whole "Toyota Tax" narrative? At a cost difference of $1500 per year, it adds up quick. All the domestics are pretty close though.

Following the link to their website, they do have a chart for the longest lasting trucks by miles with the Ram 3500 listed on top above the Tundra. I'd probably give the credit to Cummins for that. It's a surprisingly wide margin over all other brands. Not surprisingly HD's fill out the top ten with the two Toyotas being the only exceptions. The biggest surprise is the Frontier on the very bottom which is always listed highly everywhere else.

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Data like this is always tough to make sense of. Sure, I get the Tundra on top and the Ram on bottom for total lifespan. I'm more surprised by the average list price between the two. Are the Tundra's truly listed below the Ram pricing? Or is it because Ram makes more higher end models than Toyota so the average is skewed? Or is the Toyota truly priced lower which negates the whole "Toyota Tax" narrative? At a cost difference of $1500 per year, it adds up quick. All the domestics are pretty close though.

Following the link to their website, they do have a chart for the longest lasting trucks by miles with the Ram 3500 listed on top above the Tundra. I'd probably give the credit to Cummins for that. It's a surprisingly wide margin over all other brands. Not surprisingly HD's fill out the top ten with the two Toyotas being the only exceptions. The biggest surprise is the Frontier on the very bottom which is always listed highly everywhere else.

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I was thinking of emailing them today to see if they could do a more detailed search and sort by engine. I think that would pretty interesting to see.

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The interesting thing about data like this, specifically looking at RAM trucks is how people often tote how reliable they are and they win lots of reliability awards but also regularly show up dead last in other data like this.

It's weird.

It was interesting what Tim mentioned in the video that the RAM data includes the bad tranny years before the ZF and some other engine problems they used to have. I found it interesting that for the big 3 the lifespan was within 1.1 years for lifespan. A lot of the statistics for quality and dependability are for varying snapshots in time. From what I have heard Consumer reports also injects some opinions in their ratings…. Not just relying on the numbers. lol, we look at all of this then buy the one we like (for the right price). In 2010 I went looking for a dodge Dakota and came out with a TRX(4) the off-road trim at the time.

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I also wonder if the Toyota’s also stay on the road a bit longer due to reputation and resale price? You’re more likely to pay to fix a truck that you think is going to keep being reliable(ie: once you fix this one thing). If the resale of an old Toyota is say $5000 but the same year of Ford is $2000 which are you more likely to throw money at to fix?

In the past 8 months I've had two boys turn 16, my son and my step son. Both wanted small pickups. We've spent hundreds of hours combing through used trucks for under 10k. Auto trader, Marketplace, cars.com etc. It's really sad what $8,000 gets you in a used vehicle nowadays. (The Ranger was the hands down winner of reliability and quality in the mid 90's-early 2k compact trucks)

The funny thing about resale value is people seem to completely ignore the entry price of the truck. The benefit of a better resale price only really comes into play when the first owner sells and even then it's iffy. The new Tacoma is thousands more than the competitions new similar to similar... it better be worth thousand more down the road. We've already seen the Tundra doesn't work that way. They start out similarly priced to the competition but Tim has done a video on the trade in value of the 3rd gen... it's terrible.

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