Car complaints by model and year
Pick a car and see what its owners actually reported to federal regulators, ranked by the part of the vehicle they were reporting. The recalls NHTSA lists for that model year come with it. No sign-up, nothing stored, and every figure traceable to the same public file we read.
Complaint counts measure people who filed a report, not cars that failed. A model that sold in large numbers, or that was recalled, attracts reporting. Read this as what owners talked about, not as a reliability ranking.
How to read this
One complaint can name more than one component. An owner reporting a stall might have it filed under ENGINE and under FUEL SYSTEM, so the component numbers add up to more than the complaint total. That's how the federal file is built, not a fault in the arithmetic here.
The recall list is by model year, not by car. Under the complaint ranking, the page lists the recall campaigns NHTSA keeps for that make, model and year, straight from its recall file at the moment you look. They cover every car of that run. Whether your car had the work done is in the carmaker's records, which only NHTSA's own VIN lookup reads. A safety recall repair is free at a franchised dealer, as long as the car was first sold no more than 15 years before the recall.
Absence isn't safety. A car with few complaints may be reliable, or may simply be rare, or may be owned by people who never filed anything. The federal complaint system is voluntary, so a problem nobody reports never reaches it.
Ten complaints is the floor. Vehicles with fewer than ten records are left out entirely. Below that number a single unhappy owner moves the ranking, and this page is read by people deciding whether to buy something.
Where the numbers come from
These are consumer complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, taken from NHTSA's full consumer complaint database rather than from the summary API, because the full database is the one that carries every complaint.
Model years 2010 to 2025 hold 645,152 unique complaints, of which 625,987 belong to a vehicle with at least ten records and appear here, across 4,087 make, model and year combinations.
Each complaint is counted once per vehicle. NHTSA files a tire complaint twice by design, once against the vehicle and once against the tire maker, and both records count here.
Common questions
Asked most often
What is a car complaint?
A report an owner files with NHTSA (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) about a safety problem with their vehicle. Owners file voluntarily and NHTSA doesn't verify each one.
Does a high complaint count mean the car is bad?
Not on its own. Counts aren't failure rates: cars that sell in large numbers collect more complaints, and recalls or news coverage cause spikes.
How is a complaint different from a recall?
A complaint is an owner’s report. A recall is a carmaker’s or NHTSA’s action to fix a safety defect, and the recall repair is free at a dealer within 15 years of the vehicle’s first sale.
How do I file a complaint?
On NHTSA’s website, nhtsa.gov, under "Report a Safety Problem".
Sources
- NHTSA datasets and APIs, NHTSA's consumer complaint database, every complaint filed since 1995. Narrowed to model years 2010 to 2025, that's 645,152 complaints. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
- NHTSA recalls API, read live for the make, model and year you pick. Free and open, no key.
- 49 U.S.C. 30120(g), the free recall remedy and its 15-year limit, counted from the car’s first sale to the recall notice. Federal law
How this was compiled
The page loads the complaint counts once, and every lookup after that happens in your browser. Nothing you pick is sent anywhere.
What we didn’t do
We didn't weight by how many of each model were sold, because NHTSA doesn't publish that and guessing it would put a made-up number underneath every result. So a common car will out-count a rare one even if it's the better car. We also didn't read the complaint narratives here. This page ranks the component the complaint was filed under, which is the regulator’s own classification rather than ours.