25 most reliable family cars

A good family car has to be a safe and comfortable place for your loved ones, and be enjoyable enough to make mundane journeys pass easily. But perhaps most importantly of all, it should not suffer frequent costly and inconvenient breakdowns. The trouble is, picking a dependable model can be a minefield because even some low-mileage, showroom-fresh cars go wrong.

That’s where the What Car? Reliability Survey, held in association with MotorEasy, comes in, because we've gathered real-life information on 248 different models. We asked 24,927 drivers to spill the beans on their cars, telling us whether they suffered any faults in the past two years, and, if so, how long the car was off the road and how much the repairs cost.

Here, then, we reveal the 25 most reliable family cars aged up to five years old.