About

What this site is

A public record of what owners report going wrong with cars sold in America, organised by model year and scored the same way every time.

Every figure here comes from three federal sources: complaints filed with NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation, recall campaigns filed by manufacturers, and open defect investigations. Fuel-economy figures come from the EPA and Department of Energy. All of it is public domain.

The site exists because that data is technically public and practically unusable. It is spread across bulk flat files and undocumented APIs, and raw complaint counts mislead — a 2013 model has had thirteen years to accumulate reports and a 2023 has had three. Scoring every model year over an identical 60-month window is the whole idea.

What this site is not

• Not a verdict on whether a car is defective. Complaints are unverified reports from owners. They are allegations. A high complaint rate means many people reported problems, not that a fault has been established.
• Not a cross-model reliability ranking. That needs production volume, which is not publicly available. We withhold it rather than estimate it.
• Not affiliated with NHTSA, the EPA, or any vehicle manufacturer, and not endorsed by them.
• Not a substitute for a pre-purchase inspection.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, we want to fix it. Scores are reproducible from the inputs shown on each page, so a correction can be checked rather than argued about. Get in touch.

Current coverage

314 models · 2,233,015 complaint records · 3,406 recall campaigns · data vintage 2026-08-09