28,739 Recall Records Warn of a Crash. 3,341 Warn of Death.
Recall letters are written in careful language and thrown away unread. The consequence field is the part worth reading, and across 46,000 records it says the same few things.
5,866 Complaints Mention a Class Action. Almost None Mention Getting Paid.
When a fault affects thousands of identical cars, litigation becomes the obvious remedy. The complaint record shows how that path usually runs, and what it actually delivers.
26,995 Complaints Mention the Check Engine Light. 7,399 Mention That It Never Came On.
Drivers treat the dashboard as an authority on the car's condition. The complaint record contains thousands of reports about it being wrong in both directions.
277,226 Complaints Mention a Recall. In 57,696 of Them the Problem Came Back.
A recall is treated as the end of a story: defect identified, repair issued, case closed. A large minority of complaints describe what happens when the repair does not hold.
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.
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.
Two Thirds of 2022 Cars Failed the Seat Belt Reminder Test. By 2026 It Was 18%.
A rating that measures a chime sounds trivial until you look at what it is for. Nearly half of people killed in crashes are unbelted, and the cheapest available intervention is a car that refuses to shut up.
54,604 Complaints Describe Something That Almost Happened. The Power Train Leads.
Safety data counts what happened. A large set of complaints exists specifically to report what did not, and those reports arrive from systems that rarely appear in crash statistics at all.
The Passenger Side Was Tested Fifteen Years After the Driver's. It Scores Better.
For over a decade, one side of the car was crash tested and the other was assumed to match. When the assumption was finally checked, the results said something unexpected about how safety engineering responds to being measured.
88% of Cars Failed the Whiplash Test in 2000. Since 2020, Not One Has.
Most safety measures improve slowly and never finish. This one finished. Tracing head restraint ratings across two decades shows what it looks like when an industry solves something completely.
11,447 People Were Injured by a Car That Never Crashed. 1,492 of Those Reports Name the Airbag.
Injury data is usually read as crash data. A quarter of the injuries in the complaint record happened with no impact of any kind, and the components responsible are not the ones you would expect.