Where the data comes from
- Owner complaints — the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation complaint database: 1,433,608 complaints about the cars on this site, filed by owners online, by phone or by mail since 1995. Complaints through October 20, 2026 are included.
- Recalls — safety recall reports (Part 573) filed by manufacturers with NHTSA: 7,613 campaigns covering the models on this site.
- Defect investigations — NHTSA preliminary evaluations, engineering analyses and recall queries.
- Fuel economy and vehicle class — the EPA and Department of Energy fueleconomy.gov dataset.
All of it is public-domain U.S. government data. We refresh it regularly; every page shows the date of the data it uses.
Counting complaints
One complaint can involve several systems — a crash might be reported under both "steering" and "air bags". On model-year pages each complaint counts once in the total and once in every system it names, so system counts can add up to more than the total. Complaints about tires, child seats and aftermarket equipment are left out.
We group NHTSA's several hundred component codes into about twenty systems such as engine, transmission and electrical. Older NHTSA records name the same car in different ways ("Wrangler 4-DR 4X4", "Wrangler"); we merge those spellings into one model.
Comparing model years fairly
Complaints keep arriving for years after a car is sold. A ten-year-old car has had ten years to collect complaints; last year's model has had one. Comparing raw totals would make every new car look great, so we don't.
Instead, each model year is compared with the other years of the same model at the same age. For a model year that has been on sale for four years, we count the complaints filed in its first four years, and the complaints every other year of that model received in its first four years. (We take "on sale" as July 1 of the previous calendar year, when most model years arrive at dealers.) The ratio between the year and the median of the others is its index:
- Avoid — at least 2× the typical year, and at least 25 complaints in the comparison window
- Use caution — at least 1.4× the typical year, and at least 12 complaints
- Average — close to the typical year
- Better than average — at most 0.6× the typical year, when the typical year has at least 8 complaints
- Too new to judge — on sale for less than a year
Comparing a model only with itself removes the biggest distortion in complaint data: popular cars get more complaints simply because there are more of them. It does not remove every distortion — sales can rise or fall between years, and a well-publicized defect can prompt more owners to file. Treat the verdicts as a guide to what to check, not as a mechanical inspection.
What complaints are and aren't
NHTSA does not verify individual complaints, and some describe driver error or problems that were later fixed. But patterns in thousands of reports are exactly what NHTSA itself uses to open investigations and push recalls. The owner reports we quote are selected for detail and readability, lightly cleaned up (capitalisation, NHTSA's internal codes removed); personal details were already redacted by NHTSA, and we strip any phone numbers, emails and VINs that slipped through.
Corrections
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