2018 Honda CR-V Complaints: What Owners Actually Filed
Owners of the 2018 Honda CR-V filed 2,122 complaints with NHTSA, and no single system dominates: the engine leads at 25%, with the fuel/propulsion system close behind. That's a count of reports, not a rate: a model that sold in large numbers files more complaints than a rare one with a worse record, and nothing in the file knows how many were sold. Use it to decide what to inspect before buying, not to grade the car.
The 2018 Honda CR-V problems owners filed, by system
| System | Complaints | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | 524 | 25% |
| Fuel/propulsion system | 366 | 17% |
| Steering | 314 | 15% |
| Forward collision avoidance, automatic emergency braking | 311 | 15% |
| Electrical system | 261 | 12% |
| Fuel system, gasoline | 221 | 10% |
Vehicles with fewer than 10 complaints aren't in the file at all, so a system missing from this table drew fewer reports than the ones shown, not none.
Is it this year, or the model line?
The engine is named most in 6 other model years of the Honda CR-V too: 2012 (89 of 400), 2013 (97 of 381), 2014 (189 of 586), 2015 (243 of 668), 2016 (99 of 389), 2017 (527 of 1,756). That's the pattern worth reading; one year alone can be a recall season.
The whole Honda picture, every system by model year, is on the Honda brand page.
Recalls to check before you buy
The one part of this page that is a verdict rather than a count: recall campaigns are the manufacturer's own admission, filed with the regulator. The list is by model year, not by car; whether a particular car had the work done is in the dealer's records, or in NHTSA's VIN lookup through our decoder.
Recalls on file
Checking NHTSA's recall file...
What we have written about it
- do-high-mileage-cars-burn-oil for the engine
- what-is-oil-dilution for the fuel/propulsion system
- steering-wheel-shakes-when-braking for the steering
- bad-alternator-or-battery for the electrical system
- honda-crv-2017-2022-oil-dilution
What we know beyond the file
The engine leads at 25 percent, and the jump is the part worth seeing: the CR-V drew 389 filings for model year 2016 and 1,756 for 2017, the year the turbocharged engine arrived. The file doesn't record which engine a car had, so this is a correlation in time and not a count against one engine.
What this page doesn't know
How many were sold. The file counts reports, not cars, so a popular model looks worse than a rare one with the same problem.
Whether your car has it. A share of complaints isn't a probability for one vehicle. It says which system to have inspected, and which service records to ask for.
Who filed. Filing is voluntary, and a recall or a news story sends owners to the form in numbers a quiet year never sees.
What it costs to fix. Nothing on this page is a repair price. The site's cost articles are censused on specific cars, not on this file.
Sources
- NHTSA consumer complaints, FLAT_CMPL bulk file. https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa-datasets-and-apis. The copy counted here is dated 2026-08-25; one complaint is counted once per vehicle, and once per system it names. The same file drives the complaints decoder.
- NHTSA recalls API, read live for this make, model and model year when the page opens.
Counts of owner reports filed with NHTSA for the 2018 Honda CR-V, bulk file dated 2026-08-25, rebuilt with each data refresh. General information about what owners reported, not advice about a specific car.