Car complaints on file at NHTSA, counted by model

What an NHTSA complaint is

Someone who has had a safety problem with a vehicle, a tire, a car seat or equipment can report it to NHTSA. NHTSA says each complaint is added to a public database after personally identifying information is removed, and that the complaints are used, with other data, to identify safety issues that warrant investigation and to judge whether a safety-related defect trend exists. It describes the path in three stages: complaints, then investigations, then recalls. If it receives similar reports from a number of people about the same product, that could indicate a defect that warrants opening an investigation.

That is also the measure of what a complaint is not. It is one owner’s account of a problem that, in NHTSA’s words, “could be a safety defect” — not a finding that it is one.

How to read the counts

• Complaints is the number of reports NHTSA returned for the year, make and model.
• Report a crash and Report a fire count the complaints in which the owner marked one.
• Injuries and deaths are the sums of the numbers owners entered.
• Components are NHTSA’s categories. One complaint can name several, so the component counts add up to more than the total.

A count is not a rate. A model sold in large numbers, or one that has been on the road for twenty years, collects more complaints than a rare or recent one. NHTSA’s feed does not say how many of a model were sold, so Drive does not compute a rate and does not rank models against each other.

Limits

NHTSA returns all of a model’s complaints in a single answer, and Drive reads the whole of it before it can count. For a model with thousands of complaints that takes some seconds; the 2003 Honda Accord’s answer was about 2 MB when read on 28 September 2026. The page waits up to a minute and then says that api.nhtsa.gov did not answer. The make and model lists hold only vehicles with at least one complaint on file. Each complaint in NHTSA’s feed carries the first characters of the complainant’s VIN; Drive does not show them.

Filing a complaint of your own

Complaints are filed with NHTSA, not here: online at its report-a-safety-problem page, or by calling its Vehicle Safety Hotline on 888-327-4236. Have the VIN to hand; you can check that it is well formed first. To see whether the fault already has a remedy, read the model’s recall campaigns.