Cars Were 3.5 Years Old When Owners Complained. Now It's 6.4.
The regulator's complaint database is usually read as a reliability record. Read it by the age of the car instead and it turns into a record of who owns cars, for how long, and when they decide something is worth reporting.
Owners Report Steering Faults in 118 Days. Wiring Takes 165.
Every complaint carries two dates: when it happened and when somebody told the regulator. The gap between them varies by what broke — and it varies in exactly the wrong direction.
A Prius With 2,819 Complaints Sells Above Its Class. A Mirage With Five Sells Far Below It.
Owner complaints move used prices in the direction you'd expect, until you reach the cars people have already made up their minds about.
Four in Ten Five-Star Cars Only Got Four Stars for the Crash You're Most Likely to Have
The five-star badge is on 65% of rated listings. On nearly four in ten of them, the score that matters most in a real collision is a four.
Brands With 10-Year Warranties Get Four Times More Complaints Than Brands With 4-Year Ones
A long warranty reads as a statement of confidence. Lined up against the complaint record, the relationship runs the other way, and there's a reasonable explanation for it.
One Vehicle on Sale Today Has a One-Star Rollover Rating. It's a Van People Buy for Work.
Nearly every vehicle scores four or five stars on everything. Searching for the exceptions turns up exactly one, and it's not a sports car or a supermini.
Motorcycles Get 2 Recalls per Model. Cars Get 30. Triumph Gets 8.8.
Bikes are subject to the same federal safety system as cars and appear in it far less. The gap says something about how the system works, and the spread between brands says something else.
Hybrids Draw 50% More Complaints Than Petrol Cars. EVs Draw Fewer and Get Twice the Recalls.
Two electrified powertrains, two completely different reliability signatures — and neither matches what you'd expect from the number of moving parts involved.
Commercial Trucks Get More Recalls Than Cars and Almost No Complaints. Both Are True.
The complaint database is the main public signal of what goes wrong with vehicles. For an entire category it registers almost nothing, and the reason isn't that those vehicles are good.
In 2014 the Number of Recalls Jumped 55% in One Year and Never Came Back Down
You'd expect a bad year for recalls to be followed by a return to normal. Counting campaigns by year shows 2014 wasn't a spike at all — it was a step change that stuck.
The RAM 2500 Has 14 Model Years. One of Them Holds 54% of All the Complaints.
Model-level reliability scores average everything together. Broken out year by year, some models turn out to be fine except for a single catastrophic season.
Tyres Were the 7th Biggest Source of Car Complaints. Then They Went to Zero.
Whole categories of car defect don't usually vanish. This one did, in about five years, and the reason is a single scandal that reshaped how tyres are monitored.