Guides by Denis
341 articles
4,365 Complaints Mention the School Run. Their Crash Rate Is Half Again the Average.
The most repeated journey most families make is short, slow, and crowded with other people doing exactly the same thing. Vehicle faults behave differently there, and the complaint record shows how.
2,964 Complaints Come From Leased Cars. They Are Filed Earlier Than Anyone Else's.
Ownership changes what people report. Somebody who will hand the car back in two years has no resale value to protect and no repair bill to face, and it shows in the record.
14,007 Complaints Mention Heat. 3,896 Are About the Air Conditioning Stopping.
Cold exposes wear. Heat exposes capacity. The complaints filed in summer describe a different set of failures from the ones filed in January, and one of them is a safety problem people do not treat as one.
931 Complaints Come From Certified Pre-Owned Cars. The Top Two Faults Are Engine and Gearbox.
Certification costs the buyer real money and is sold as peace of mind. The complaints filed by people who paid for it point at a specific and predictable limitation.
23,152 Complaints Mention the Police. 6,106 Mention the Fire Brigade.
Most complaints are about inconvenience. A measurable minority describe the day somebody called for help, and those reports behave differently from everything else in the record.
62,142 Complaints State the Exact Mileage. 19,999 Mention the Warranty in the Same Breath.
Nobody asks for the mileage. A sixth of complaints supply it anyway, usually to the exact thousand, because the number is doing a job in the argument the owner is making.
15,810 Complaints Describe a Fault That Happens in the Morning. Only 1.4% Involve a Crash.
Some faults only exist before the car has warmed up. They are harmless by the numbers and expensive by the time anyone takes them seriously.
12,007 Owners Reported a Surge or a Lurch. 7,186 Were Told the Fault Could Not Be Reproduced.
A workshop can only repair what it can observe. For a whole class of faults that is the entire problem, and it leaves the owner holding a car that misbehaves only when nobody official is watching.
5,489 Vehicle Fires Started While the Car Was Parked. 2,555 of Them at Home.
A car fire is imagined as a roadside event. In the complaint record it is most often a domestic one, and that changes which precaution actually matters.
A Fault in a Car Park Ends in a Collision 12.7% of the Time. On the Motorway, 5.1%.
Speed is the first thing anyone thinks about when a car goes wrong. Sorting the complaint record by location shows that the places where nothing is moving quickly produce collisions two and a half times more often.
9,262 Complaints Mention Rain. A Quarter of Them Are About Not Being Able to See.
Rain does not break cars. It exposes the parts nobody checks before buying, and the complaint record is unusually specific about which ones.
1,372 Owners Filed a Complaint and Traded the Car In. 1,027 Said They Would Never Buy the Brand Again.
There is a moment when a fault stops being a repair problem and becomes a resale problem. A few thousand complaints record exactly that moment, and what it cost the person who reached it.