The complaint database is normally read one model at a time: how many, about what, how bad. Read it by the age of the car instead and something else appears.
| Complaints filed | Average age of the car | Records |
|---|---|---|
| 1995-1999 | 3.5 yrs | 70,243 |
| 2000-2004 | 3.8 yrs | 122,666 |
| 2005-2009 | 4.5 yrs | 111,806 |
| 2010-2014 | 6.0 yrs | 192,199 |
| 2015-2019 | 6.7 yrs | 271,797 |
| 2020-2024 | 6.4 yrs | 237,889 |
In the late 1990s, the typical complaint concerned a car barely out of warranty. Today it concerns one that has been through at least one resale.
Three things moved at once
The first is that cars last longer. A twelve-year-old vehicle in 1997 was often finished; today it is ordinary, and the average age of the fleet on American roads has climbed past twelve years. More old cars on the road means more old cars experiencing faults.
The second is who is doing the complaining. A three-year-old car belongs to its first owner, who takes a fault to the dealer under warranty. A seven-year-old car belongs to somebody who bought it used, has no warranty to fall back on, and for whom the regulator's complaint form is one of the few available channels.
The third is that filing got easier. An online form reachable in two minutes produces a different population of complaints than a paper process did, and it particularly lowers the barrier for the low-grade long-running faults that owners of older cars deal with.
Why this changes how a model's record should be read
A raw complaint count treats every entry the same. The age distribution says they are not the same at all.
A complaint on a two-year-old car is close to a manufacturing defect report. Something was built wrong or designed wrong, and it failed while the car was still essentially new.
A complaint on a twelve-year-old car — and 16.6% of all complaints are filed ten or more years after the model year — is usually about something that wore out. Sometimes that is a genuine design flaw showing up late. Sometimes it is a component reaching the end of a reasonable life on a vehicle that has not been maintained.
Both are worth knowing and they answer different questions. Mixed into one number they answer neither.
The part used buyers actually need
Late complaints are the more useful half for anyone shopping second-hand, and they are the half that gets least attention.
Early-life complaints tell you what the factory got wrong, which matters most to the person buying new. Late-life complaints tell you what fails after a decade — corrosion, fuel system components, electrical faults, the things that decide whether a fifteen-year-old example is worth buying.
That information only exists because people keep filing about old cars, and the fact that they increasingly do is why the data is more useful to used buyers now than it was in 1997.
Reading a complaint list properly
Two questions to ask of any model's record before drawing a conclusion.
How old were the cars? A hundred complaints on two-year-old vehicles is a much stronger signal than a hundred spread across twenty years of production.
And what do the late ones describe? If a model's complaints cluster at ten-plus years and all concern the same component, that is a real pattern about how it ages — which is exactly what you want to know before buying one at that age.
Whether any of it has produced a recall on the specific vehicle in front of you is a separate question, and a free VIN check answers that one directly.
Frequently asked questions
How old is the average car when someone files a complaint?
6.4 years, based on complaints filed since 2020. In the late 1990s the figure was 3.5 years. The average vehicle being complained about has aged by nearly three years over three decades, while the fleet itself got older too.
Does an older complaint mean the fault is less serious?
Not necessarily, but it means something different. A complaint on a two-year-old car usually describes a manufacturing defect. A complaint on a twelve-year-old car often describes a wear item that failed unusually early, and separating the two matters when you are reading a model's record.
Why do people complain about older cars now?
Because they own them for longer. Cars last further into their lives than they did in the 1990s, so more of the fleet on the road at any moment is old, and the second and third owners of a vehicle are now a large share of the people experiencing faults on it.
Should I ignore complaints about old model years?
No — read them by what they describe. Complaints filed ten or more years after a car was built (16.6% of the total) tend to cluster around corrosion, fuel systems and electrical faults, which is exactly the information a used buyer needs and which the early-life complaints do not contain.
Denis Kataev is a serial solopreneur and the founder of ForCar. With 15+ years in software engineering and 10 years in SEO, he builds data-driven products end to end — backed by a sharp eye for design. At ForCar he mines proprietary vehicle datasets, turning raw numbers into buying advice you can actually trust.
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