22 High-Mileage Cars to Avoid: Ranked Worst First

Short answer

The Equinox is worst, at one complaint in four

The high mileage cars to avoid, on this measure, are the Chevrolet Equinox, the Nissan Sentra, the Kia Optima, the Nissan Rogue and the Ford Focus, the worst five across 48,481 NHTSA complaints covering 22 models at the 2012, 2014 and 2016 model years.

Counting complaints mostly counts buyers. We measured what share of each model's own complaints describe a four-figure failure instead.

Every number behind this list of high mileage cars to avoid is one you can recount yourself, from a file anyone can download. The ranking is by model year rather than by odometer: a 2012 with 80,000 miles carries the same known fault as one with 180,000, and the miles only change how likely it has shown itself yet.

Why is the usual list a popularity contest?

Because it counts complaints rather than failures, and the cars that sold in the biggest numbers collect the most complaints. The obvious raw material for a list like this is the federal complaint database.

It's free, it's public, and it's enormous.

It's also a trap, and the trap catches nearly everybody.

The Ford Focus has 7,537 complaints across the three model years we scanned. The Toyota RAV4 has 694.

Read that as a reliability verdict and you've concluded that Ford builds cars eleven times worse than Toyota. What you've measured is that Ford sold a great many more Focuses.

NHTSA publishes no sales figures, so there's nothing to divide by. Any ranking of the most unreliable used cars built on complaint counts is a list of popular cars wearing a warning label.

What measure survives the sales figures?

There's a way around it: stop comparing models to each other and compare a model to itself.

Of everything the owners of one car complained about, what share described a failure that ends in a four-figure bill. A failed engine, a dead transmission, a timing belt or chain, a , oil consumption serious enough to write in about?

Sales volume inflates the top and the bottom of that fraction equally, so it cancels out. A model that sold five million units and one that sold fifty thousand can be set side by side fairly.

We ran it over 22 mainstream models at the 2012, 2014 and 2016 model years, keeping only models with 300 complaints or more. Below that the share is noise.

Those years are the high-mileage market itself. A light vehicle in the United States covers 11,026 miles a year on the federal figures, so a 2016 is around 110,000 miles now and a 2012 around 155,000.

That's the band this ranking describes, past the 100,000 miles where buying advice usually draws its line.

Car instrument cluster close-up, the odometer reading 147,253 miles beside the fuel gauge — 147,253 miles, inside the band this ranking covers. Photo: Srattha Nualsate · Pexels

The spread isn't subtle: 2.1% at the bottom, 25.8 at the top, which is one complaint in fifty against one in four. By model year it is wider still, from a 2012 Corolla at zero to a 2012 Equinox at 30%.

What the share doesn't say

One thing to hold on to before reading the order: this isn't a probability, and a low figure isn't a mark of the safest car to buy. It doesn't say the Equinox is twelve times more likely to break than the Corolla.

It says that when an Equinox owner writes to the regulator, the odds are roughly one in four that they're describing something that will cost four figures, and for a Corolla owner, roughly one in fifty.

For a used buyer those are two different questions, how often a car goes wrong and what it costs when it does, and only the second one is answered here.

Which high mileage cars to avoid come out worst?

The Chevrolet Equinox, at 419 of its 1,623 complaints, and the fault is oil consumption. Behind it the Nissan Sentra, on the CVT, the belt-and-pulley automatic that has no fixed gears at all.

Then the Kia Optima on outright engine failure, the Nissan Rogue on the CVT a hair behind it, and the Ford Focus on its dual-clutch.

Those five hold the top of the list, and each of them holds it for one named reason.

That concentration is what makes the ratio worth reading. A share on its own is an accusation without evidence.

The same scan says what the complaints are about, and each of these models has one dominant story rather than a scattering of unrelated faults, reported over and over by different owners in their own words.

The list below is all 22 models, worst first. Three of its columns mean something specific, so read these three lines before the list itself:

What goes wrong is the fault these complaints name most often. It's the story the model is known for, not the only thing that can break on it.
Four-figure failures counts the complaints describing a repair that runs into four figures, against every complaint the model has. What four figures means in dollars depends on the fault: our own pages put a head gasket at $1,200 to $5,500 as owners reported it, parts and labor, and a rebuilt or replaced transmission at $2,500 to $6,000 fitted. For an engine replaced outright we couldn't source a range we were willing to publish, so this page doesn't give one.
The bold year is the model year with the largest share of four-figure complaints. It's where the trouble concentrates, not the only year affected.

ModelWhat goes wrongFour-figure failures201220142016

Chevrolet EquinoxOil consumption419 of 1,62330%21%24%
Nissan SentraCVT197 of 82819%26%24%
Kia OptimaEngine failure377 of 2,25213%13%25%
Nissan RogueCVT215 of 1,29127%12%15%
Ford FocusDual-clutch1,172 of 7,53711%20%20%
Toyota CamryTransmission180 of 1,22416%18%3%
Hyundai SonataEngine failure432 of 3,01910%11%28%
Nissan AltimaCVT287 of 2,09020%10%16%
Subaru OutbackCVT130 of 1,14328%13%3%
Ford EscapeTransmission396 of 3,7642%12%13%
Subaru ForesterOil consumption73 of 91817%11%2%
Hyundai ElantraEngine failure103 of 1,3233%13%11%
Chevrolet CruzeHead gasket141 of 1,8137%9%6%
Honda CR-VTiming chain100 of 1,3755%9%6%
Volkswagen JettaTiming chain58 of 1,0453%9%8%
Ford FusionEngine failure214 of 5,4451%4%9%
Honda AccordOil consumption74 of 1,9462%5%3%
Toyota RAV4Transmission24 of 6941%7%3%
Honda CivicCVT58 of 1,8171%14%1%
Chevrolet MalibuEngine failure55 of 2,0902%4%3%
Jeep Grand CherokeeEngine failure105 of 4,3192%3%3%
Toyota CorollaCVT19 of 9250%4%4%

The Focus filter correction

The Ford Focus is the one that nearly got away. Our first pass looked for the words owners of a broken transmission are assumed to use, failed, slipping, replaced, and it put the Focus at 4.5%, apparently safer than a CR-V.

Anyone who lived through the DPS6 dual-clutch would have known instantly that this was wrong. Those owners don't write “transmission failure.”

What those owners write is that it shudders, jerks and hesitates, and 570 of them did. Widening the filter to the words people use moved the Focus from 4.5% to 15.5, and barely moved anything else.

What it says about CVTs

The list says something about CVTs that a headline about them doesn't. 6 of the 22 carry one as their named fault, and they sit almost everywhere in the order.

The Sentra and the Rogue are second and fourth; the Civic and the Corolla are in the bottom four of all 22.

On this evidence the transmission type isn't what predicts the bill. Our own read of the complaint record and the class-action settlements lands in the same place: the gap is between brands, not technologies, which is what CVT problems by maker works through.

Which ones come out best?

The Toyota Corolla, at 2.1%, then the Grand Cherokee, the Malibu, the Civic, the RAV4, the Accord and the Fusion: the seven lowest of the 22, none of them above 4%. The bottom of the ranking is worth as much as the top, and it's the part a buyer can act on most cheaply.

If you can't inspect much, or you're buying at a distance, the bottom of the list is where a bad guess costs you least: when these cars do go wrong, their own owners are mostly writing in about something that doesn't run into four figures. Our free car complaints lookup shows what owners of the exact car have filed, and the VIN decoder lists its model year's recalls.

Where does this measure lie to you?

The denominator is every complaint about the car, whatever it is about. So a model with one enormous non-drivetrain problem gets a flattering score for a reason that has nothing to do with its drivetrain.

The Toyota Corolla is the clearest case. It scores best in the whole ranking at 2.1%, and 54.5% of its complaints are filed against the air bags, most of them on the 2012 model year and its Takata inflator recall.

That recall swelled the bottom of the fraction enormously, and the drivetrain share fell as a matter of arithmetic. The Corolla is a genuinely reliable car, but this particular number is flattering it, and we would rather say so than let a good result stand on a bad foundation.

The Jeep Grand Cherokee is the same shape of problem. It looks safe at 2.4%, on 4,319 complaints of which 32% are electrical and 13% brakes.

Its owners had a great deal to complain about, and very little of it was the drivetrain, which is what this measure asks about and all it can answer.

The year columns carry a second finding. 11 of the 22 moved by six points or more between 2012 and 2016, and they didn't all move the same way: 6 got worse and 5 got better.

A newer model year isn't automatically the safer buy here, and an older one isn't automatically the worse one.

Four limits on this data

Three of the four apply to any use of this database, because a complaint count reflects owners as much as cars, and it undercounts some faults:

Filing a complaint tracks anger, warranty status and press coverage as much as it tracks metal. A class action or a recall drives filings on its own.
The database is a safety file, so an expensive fault that never made a car unsafe is under-reported.
The filters are word matches over text people wrote themselves, so they miss complaints that describe a fault without naming it, exactly as ours did with the Focus until we caught it.

A fourth limit is ours rather than the database's: the scan covers three model years, 2012, 2014 and 2016. A fault that arrived after them can't appear in it however well documented it is elsewhere.

Honda's 1.5-liter turbo is the clearest case: the CR-V oil dilution complaints concern model years 2017 to 2022, which is to say every one of them falls outside the window this measure looked at.

How do you use this in front of a car?

None of the above tells you whether the specific car in front of you is sound. It tells you what to check hardest, which is a different and more useful thing.

Near the top of that ranking the failure isn't a mystery. It's one named component, and each of these seven failures has a test you can run at a viewing:

A CVT, from cold. Hold 40 mph, then accelerate hard. Revs flaring with no gain in speed is the tell.
A conventional automatic, in its first minute. Select D and count. More than a second before the car moves, or revs flaring between gears, is the fault this measure counts.
A dual-clutch, at walking pace. Shuddering at 5 to 15 mph as you pull away is the fault itself, not a rough road surface.
The engine, on a . A rhythmic knock that rises with the revs is the one to walk away from.
A timing chain, in the first two seconds. A rattle before oil pressure builds is a stretched chain, not a cold engine.
Oil use, on the dipstick twice. Check it, drive 100 miles, check it again. A visible drop over that distance is roughly a quart per 1,000.
A head gasket, in the coolant rather than the oil. Oil film in the header tank, and a system that won't hold pressure cold.

Four of those seven need a cold engine: the CVT, the automatic, the engine itself and the timing chain. A seller who warms the car up before you arrive has taken all four away.

Ask to start it cold, and come back another day if you can't.

If you can't run them yourself, buy the checking. A pre-purchase inspection at an independent shop is the same tests, done by somebody who does them daily.

It's worth more on these models than on most, because you can name the fault when you book it.

Ask for the service history in the same breath. On a car of this age a documented engine or transmission replacement moves the fault from ahead of you to behind you.

What the whole class of these cars costs to keep once you've bought one is a separate question, and a bigger one: see the 100k mile maintenance cost breakdown. If it is oil use specifically that worries you, the thresholds are stranger than they look, and our guide to what counts as normal oil consumption gives the figures.

Conclusion

Judge the failure, not the count

This isn't a reliability ranking and never was. It answers one question: when this model goes wrong, how often does it go wrong expensively?

The Equinox answers one in four.

The Corolla answers one in fifty.

That's worth more to a used buyer than a count of complaints, which is really a list of the cars most people bought. Read it as a shopping list and it misleads: a high share says the failures are expensive, not that they're likely.

So find the model's one named fault in the list and check that hardest. A car whose known failure has already been repaired is a better buy than one where it is still ahead of you.

A ranking tells you which question to put to a seller; it can't answer it, and Oil & Miles keeps that line on every used-car page.

Looking at a Nissan CVT car?CVT transmission problems

Looking at a 1.5 turbo CR-V?Honda CR-V oil dilution

Common questions

Asked most often

Does a high complaint share mean the car will break?

No, and this is the misreading to avoid: it means that among owners who complained, a large share complained about something expensive. A car can have a high share and a low failure rate if few owners have trouble at all. It narrows what to inspect; it doesn't predict your car.

Why only 2012, 2014 and 2016?

Those are old enough to be genuinely high-mileage purchases now and recent enough that the complaint file is well populated. Sampling every year would have tripled the scan without changing the shape of the answer.

Should I avoid every car on the list?

No. A Nissan with documented CVT replacement is a better buy than an untouched one, and the same is true of a Focus with the clutch pack done. The list tells you which question to ask the seller, and the answer can be reassuring.

Where do used cars with engine problems show up here?

In the engine-failure column, mostly. The Kia Optima and Hyundai Sonata are the clearest cases in this scan: engine failure is the fault their four-figure complaints name most, with oil consumption behind it. That's a different failure from the transmission cars above it, and a different conversation with a seller.

What about brands not on the list?

They weren't scanned, and absence isn't a clean bill of health. We picked 22 mainstream models with enough complaints to be meaningful. A model missing here is missing, not cleared.

What people ask next

Sources

Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 2023, Table VM-1, for the 11,026 miles a year of a short-wheelbase light vehicle. FHWA
NHTSA consumer complaints, the FLAT_CMPL bulk export, for the 48,481 complaints scanned across 22 models at the 2012, 2014 and 2016 model years, and for the component shares, from NHTSA's own component classification. NHTSA, read September 1, 2026

How this was compiled

For each model we took the share of its own complaints matching a fixed pattern for expensive drivetrain failure, counted once per complaint. The pattern and the counts are kept on file, so both can be checked rather than taken on trust. Component shares use NHTSA's own classification on the same records, each complaint counted once per component it names.

Where the page says what breaks, we counted which fault the matching complaints name and kept the commonest. The Focus is 570 describing a shuddering transmission and 219 naming the dual-clutch outright, the same fault written two ways; 40 complaints do both, so the two together are 749 rather than 789.

An earlier version of this page used NHTSA's per-vehicle complaint lookup. That returns 14 complaints for the 2014 Toyota Camry where the bulk export holds 455, and we checked those individually; every other model year we tested agreed between the two. The Camry share was published at 12.6% on the short count and is 14.7% on the full one, which moved it from eighth to sixth. Nothing else moved by more than 0.2 of a point.

The share is a ratio inside each model, so sales volume cancels out and a model that sold five million units can be set beside one that sold fifty thousand. The pattern used to match a four-figure failure is kept on file rather than described here.

The mileage band for each model year is our own arithmetic from the federal miles-a-year figure, not a published figure. The dominant-failure counts and the airbag, electrical and brake shares quoted above come from the same complaint scan, using the same public data.

What we didn't do

We didn't obtain sales figures, so we deliberately didn't calculate complaints per vehicle sold, which is the number everyone wants and nobody publishes free. We didn't weight by severity, cost or mileage either: a failed engine and a shuddering clutch count the same here.

We didn't scan every model year, every trim or every engine, so a fault confined to one engine option is diluted across the model. We didn't verify any individual complaint, and we have no way to tell a genuine failure from a mistaken one.

We didn't adjust for the airbag and recall effects described above; we identified where they distort the result and left the number alone rather than massaging it.

Written for the US market, compiled in September 2026. This article is general information, not advice about your specific vehicle. See the disclaimer.