About the data

Everything here comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US agency that collects safety complaints from drivers and oversees recalls. Files downloaded October 20, 2026.

Sources

• Owner complaints: every vehicle safety complaint filed with NHTSA since 1995, with the component, mileage at failure and whether there was a crash, fire or injury.
• Recalls: Part 573 defect reports filed by manufacturers, with the defect, the risk and the remedy.
• Defect investigations opened by NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation.

These are public records of the US government. The raw files are on the NHTSA datasets page.

How we count

We cover model years 2000 and later for passenger cars, SUVs, pickups and vans. A model year gets its own page once it has at least 25 complaints. One complaint can name several components, so it counts once in the total and once under each component it mentions. Mileage is the median: half of the reports came in below that figure.

What the numbers cannot tell you

Complaints are reports from owners, not confirmed defects. They are not adjusted for how many cars were sold, so a best-selling model will show more of them than a rare one. Recent model years have had less time to collect complaints. Use the counts to compare years of the same model and to see what tends to fail, not as a reliability score.

Privacy

NHTSA files include partial VINs, cities and dealer details. We publish none of them. Owner quotes are shortened, and anything that looks like a VIN, phone number or email address is removed.

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