Developed in 1994 at the University of Michigan, ACSI is the only national cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction in the United States. It tracks approximately 400 companies in about 40 consumer industries across 10 economic sectors on an annual basis, and is the largest single benchmarking study in the U.S.

The ACSI Automobile Study 2025 highlights that the perceived gap between mass market and luxury brands is at its smallest since 2021—with a score of 79 and 80, respectively. This trend is driven by luxury customers who appear to be more price sensitive than they were a year ago. At the same time, luxury brands tend to fumble when it comes to the implementation of in-car technology, dragging down their overall satisfaction score.

Interestingly, while driving performance remains high for both mass market and luxury brands, there’s a far larger gap between the satisfaction of owning hybrids versus pure electric vehicles in the mass market space driven mostly by range (77 versus 64) and expected future resale/trade-in value (73 versus 63). However, that difference is closer in the luxury space where the gap for both range and expected future resale/trade-in value goes down to 76 versus 71 and 77 versus 70, respectively.

ACSI says that while early hybrid and EV adopters had higher satisfaction because of the tech novelty, as the market starts maturing, new customers may have different expectations. For example, some newer hybrid customers might have higher expectations about fuel efficiency or some newer EV customers might expect to drive longer distances on a full charge.

Among brands, ACSI finds Subaru has the most satisfied customers with a score of 85. Subaru leads the pack, most especially in perceived safety and durability among all mass market brands. They’re followed closely by Mazda and Toyota who find themselves tied with 82. Stellantis brands, particularly Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and Ram all find themselves at the bottom.

Meanwhile, Lexus leads all luxury brands thanks to the strength of their hybrid line-up which has helped boost its ACSI score by 6 (87). Mercedes-Benz is down 1 to 82, while Audi and BMW both drop to the lowest in the luxury space due to their BEVs.