It is extremely difficult to make a reliable supercar. When you’re messing with that kind of speed, performance, and top-end ferocity, you can either produce something that just checks a few boxes on paper and makes it the “fastest around a track” or the “fastest in a drag race”… Or you can make something that is shockingly great to own all around! Look no further than the DMC Delorean for example of what happens when you get too excited and don’t focus any attention on quality.
Also extremely difficult is finding out which of these cars is truly reliable. The fact is when you get into such highly expensive and commoditized cars you have a much, much smaller sample size. Unlike the Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla, there are no major statistics. They’re just aren’t. The best way to judge if a supercar is any good is to ask a previous owner and, even then, that is extremely difficult as they are generally the ultra-wealthy and recluse of the world. Since we don’t have Daniel Mac on our team, the second-best thing to do is to look at the history, the lower-end models that might’ve sold more, the engines inside, and the manufacturer’s reputation. That’s not to say that this is speculation! If you are in a position to own one of these cars, so long as you follow the maintenance schedules and don’t drive it flat out all the time you will be pleasantly surprised at the car’s longevity.
10 Honda Acura NSX
source: wsupercars
In case you haven’t heard, that Honda Acura NSX will be done for after 2022. While this is a tragedy, it’s not necessarily from bad sales. A lot of companies will release a nice car like this that is too expensive to build for them to keep up. In the case of the NSX, this is extremely true. It’s very far out of Acura‘s/Hondas current lineup. We’re talking about the same people that make the Civic! That means that the NSX was a massive undertaking and continues to be for every single one they make, and is primarily used to promote the performance ability of the brand.
Via cnet.com
It’s reassuring to know that they don’t make a massive profit every time someone buys one, but besides this, we do have to point out that it is a Honda! In our years of car experience, we have not met a single person who for one reason or another ever thought that Honda was an unreliable car. We’ve even met several that would denounce Toyota, but Hondas are so repeatably reliable, and they have such a massive reputation to uphold, that the NSX by all reports and standards is the same despite being a grand 500 hp twin-turbo beast with the coveted VTEC to boot.
9 Porsche 911 GT3 RS
Via: Facebook
We were a little surprised when this kept coming up on our radar, German cars are never known for their reliability. It turns out that a great number of Porsche cars have some of the fewest problems out of any new car in the world! That’s not what we think, that’s J.D. Power’s 2021 assessment. The Porsche 911 is awarded “the highest-ranked model for trouble-free ownership.” Besides that, it’s not uncommon for Porsches to sail past the 200,000-mile mark.
Via Drive
This doesn’t necessarily include the GT3 RS, Porsches high-performance model. Well it is the same engine and chassis and a lot of the components are shared, the performance upgrades also tend to be more resilient. One side of this is the carbon-ceramic brakes designed to last on a racecourse, also the 4 L flat-six engine that makes 510 hp I said to be one of the best and one of the most reliable flagship engines to ever come out of Volkswagen/Audi/Porsche.
8 Hennessey Venom GT
Via: YouTube
Hennessey call to start as a tuning company based out of Texas but decided they had enough of working with other manufacturers’ cars and wanted to build their own high-performance vehicles to show what they could do. Based on the Lotus Exige (A great platform car to build off of as we learned from the very first Tesla Roadster), the Hennessey Venom GT Spyder gets a whopping 1451 hp! it does this using a general motor LS7 V8 with a TwinTurbo. Anyone familiar with the car world or engine swapping at all will recognize the “LS” to mean the most reliable race engine to ever bless an engine bay.
Via Pinterest
How old has Hennessy actually built cars? Whenever they get into engines and completely re-create them into a racing machine often with 300 400 more horsepower, they also come with a warranty. Not a lot of tuning companies can say that but Hennessy gnosis stuff and they know it’s so well that there have been very very few reported issues with any of the 29 cars out in the world. Hennessy has since moved on to create much faster cars that aren’t based on any platform but are built from the ground up. How they will actually perform in the real world we have some idea based on the companies reputation but no real idea seeing how there just isn’t a sample size yet.
7 Nissan GT-R
Via Teahub
Nissan isn’t necessarily known for being reliable, so when they got a supercar on this list do you know it has to be for a special reason. The situation is a lot like Hennessey’s. While any supercar you could possibly drive will be less reliable than almost any Nissan you can pick up, the GTR is largely built by Nismo, Nissan’s in-house tuning company which has a great reputation for building some of the very best and also… Surprisingly durable, record-breaking cars since the 1980s.
Via: Caricos.com
The modern R35 takes into consideration some things that many supercars do not include a superior transmission, a better handling of the high power output (600 hp) to the AWD system, oh and I generally great platform for tuning and customizing your own car as very many GTR owners do and have done since the first one in 1969.
6 Koenigsegg Agera RS
Via Koenigsegg
Despite being a company that strictly sells some of the very fastest and most rare cars in the world, Koenigsegg actually has a fairly good reputation. In the 2010 Koenigsegg Agera, the Swedish company decided to utilize a 5.0 L V8 that minivans will recognize under the name “Coyote.” This is Ford’s flagship engine for fast cars from the Mustang GT to the Ford GT and briefly was used in their F-150s as well. The company doesn’t make a big fuss that they took the engine from another car, but the fact is that is the root of their powertrain despite it having many many alterations.
via: Reddit
While the 5.0 L V8 engine has been around for over 40 years, many changes have taken place between models and generations of cars in the closest similarity to what Koenigsegg uses is the Ford GT‘s engine, which as it turns out is a very reliable part of the car. The coyote engine is second only to the LS when it comes to high power engine swaps, and it’s obvious why Koenigsegg chose it for the Agera.
5 Lexus LFA
Via NetCarShow
You may know Lexus to be Toyotas luxury brand, but this is no Prius! During its brief life that ended in 2012, the Lexus LFA quickly gained a massive reputation. Jeremy Clarkson is known to have a lot of favorite cars but he has continually referenced the LFA as one of his very favorites. Sadly, like the NSX it was too expensive for Toyota to justify producing which was a good sign for anyone who had bought one to know that they were not getting screwed over but being part of Toyota making their own history.
Via Carscoops
The LFA made 553 hp with a 4.8 L V 10 straight out of Toyotas on the workshop, none of this BMW nonsense that we see in the modern supra. The engine and the way it was tuned makes one of the very best sounds you’ll ever hear in history and, of course, it was built in a Toyota factory with Toyota standards so you can rest assured that every single part of this car will stand up to the test of time, and since it has been around for so long we already know that it has stood up just fine. Despite technically being a supercar and having a very wide range of high-performance aspects the car has thus far seemed to rival in reliability to the companies on Corolla and Camry.
4 Ford GT
From Facebook
Ford gets a lot of flak with the GT especially after being blamed for the death of Ken Miles has played by Christian Bale in the 2019 film Ford v Ferrari. Ford has used new technology to fix the brakes, and they don’t intend to make the same mistake again. In the new generation with that aspect out of the way, we can look at the GT for what it really is and what it could’ve been. The fact is they did beat Ferrari, but it wasn’t just some silly circuit race, the Ford GT took on the 24 hours of Le Mans.
Via: Ford
Not to confuse the original with the reboot car, both Ford GT‘s have taken on Lemans and proven themselves to be respectively reliable at the highly difficult and car-challenging race. We already mentioned the coyote engine which has proven itself overtime. One thing that can always be said about the blue oval is that if you take good care of it it will last forever. Well it might not be reliable to trash it and drive it recklessly, you can still open it up every once in a while and so long as you follow the standard maintenance procedures the car will treat you well.
3 Saleen S7
Via mecum.com
Not many people know about Celine automotive, an American company, but their S7 certainly made as one of the best performance cars in the world and was certainly the best to come out of America in a long time. It, too, featured a Ford engine, the Ford Windsor V8 small block.
Via: Saleen
With this 7.0 L engine, they were able to pull 750 hp in a car that weighs under 3000 pounds! A car company, like Hennessey, got its start as a tuning company and fill this car in 2000 to 2006. One of the real reasons we know the car is so reliable is that it has lasted this long and even though they only made A handful, including the S7-R which was also made to compete in Le Mans.
2 Audi R8
Via thecarconnection.com
There are a lot of names here that people don’t usually associate with being reliable, Audi, Lamborghini, V 10, and 602 hp. While this is a high-performance supercar, it will hold up just about as well as any Audi wood which isn’t necessarily amazing but it isn’t bad either if you take care of it. It’s also extremely good for any supercar general. as it turns out, Audi spent a lot of time and effort to pair the Lamborghini engine with their Audi.
As a bonus, Audi and Porsche is (basically) the same company and is very familiar with performance. Ever since 2014, the R8 has come with a dual-clutch transmission, granting even more longevity, not to mention improved performance. Since the Audi R8 has been around since 2006 there is a lot more experience to pull from, and the result is that people who do not give their car cheetah-print wrap jobs and race them everywhere actually end up with shockingly reliable cars, a high-performance machine that doesn’t have too many issues and gives you the benefit of mid-engine performance with an Audi/Porsche pedigree.
1 2022 Corvette Stingray
You may notice that for the first time on this list we are talking about a very brand new car that very few have had a chance to own yet! The Corvette has been a historically brilliant car, but until recently it hasn’t necessarily been considered a supercar. With the new mid-engine layout and a typical boost in horsepower, it is now what we might call a supercar, despite having a price tag of just $60,000, low enough that most people could afford it if they get their credit score up for a month or two.
Via: GM
The reason for choosing the 2022 is also because it is the second generation of a new format of car, giving the people at GM enough time to find out what was going wrong and fix it. Now the Chevy-LS-powered American race car pushes almost 500 hp in a 6.2 L V8 and it does this with an almost unbroken line that reaches back to 1953! To have a car this successful for this long means that you have to be doing something right! And Corvette is. Despite being generally unreliable for a car car, it holds its own in the supercar world, and many are known to get well over 200,000 miles!
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About The Author
Wyatt Peterson
(94 Articles Published)
Wyatt is from Utah and likes to bike, ski, and drive too fast. He’s written articles on motorcycles and cars for years, and especially likes Japanese cars and off-road vehicles. He has been featured in DriveTribe more than once and some of his content has had over 6.5 million views. He loves Formula 1, Formula Drift, the Baja 1000, and World Rally Cross!
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