Every complaint filed with the regulator carries two dates. One is when the thing happened. The other is when somebody sat down and reported it.
Across 1,070,171 records that carry both, the average gap is 164 days. But the average hides the useful structure, because how long people wait depends almost entirely on what broke.
| Component | Complaints | Average delay | Involved fire | Involved a crash |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steering | 62,369 | 118 days | 0.6% | 3.7% |
| Engine | 67,870 | 126 days | 4.1% | 0.6% |
| Tyres | 15,170 | 130 days | 0.3% | 6.3% |
| Brakes | 29,685 | 138 days | 0.5% | 7.4% |
| Suspension | 29,812 | 142 days | 0.3% | 3.4% |
| Power train | 88,781 | 153 days | 0.5% | 3.2% |
| Electrical system | 75,855 | 165 days | 9.1% | 0.9% |
The fast ones are the ones you feel
Steering is reported quickest, and the reason is physical. When steering does something unexpected it does it in your hands, at speed, and it is impossible to file away as a maybe. There is a moment, and the moment has a date.
Engine and brakes follow the same logic. The car does something wrong while you are operating it, and the event is discrete enough to remember and describe.
The slow one is the dangerous one
Electrical faults are reported slowest, at 165 days, and 9.1% of them involve fire. That combination is the finding.
Electrical problems do not arrive as events. They arrive as intermittent oddities: a window that works most of the time, a dashboard light that comes on and clears itself, a radio that resets. None of that reads as a safety defect, so people live with it for months and mention it at the next service, or not at all.
The fault that eventually starts a fire has usually been announcing itself in that low-grade way for a long time. By the time somebody files, the incident being reported is the fire, not the six months of flickering that preceded it.
Why the delay matters beyond the individual car
Regulators do not act on single complaints. They look for clusters — enough reports about the same component on the same vehicles to justify opening an investigation.
A component that gets reported in 118 days reaches that threshold sooner than one reported in 165. The pattern becomes visible earlier, the investigation opens earlier, and the recall lands earlier. The reporting delay propagates all the way to the repair.
Which means the slow-reported components are systematically recalled later in their life than the fast-reported ones, independent of how dangerous they are.
The other split in the data
The average of 164 days is misleading in a specific way, because the distribution has two humps.
38.4% of complaints are filed within a week — somebody had a frightening experience and reported it immediately. Another 12.8% arrive more than a year afterwards, usually when the owner discovers a recall, reads about other people's failures, or is finally prompted by a repair bill.
Very little lands in the middle. People either report at once or eventually get around to it, and almost nobody takes two months.
What to do with an intermittent fault
The practical lesson runs against instinct. The fault worth reporting is not the dramatic one — that one gets reported by everybody. It is the small recurring electrical oddity that nobody bothers with.
If you are buying rather than reporting, the same asymmetry applies in reverse. Complaint counts under-represent slow-reported components, so a model with few electrical complaints may simply have owners who have not filed yet.
Recalls are the other side of the same record, and those are checkable per vehicle. A free VIN check lists what is open on a specific car, including campaigns issued long after it was sold.
Frequently asked questions
How long do people wait before reporting a car fault?
164 days on average across 1,070,171 complaints that carry both dates. The distribution is heavily split: 38.4% are filed within a week of the incident, while 12.8% arrive more than a year later.
Which faults get reported fastest?
Steering, at 118 days average, followed by engine problems at 126 and tyres at 130. These are faults you notice while driving and cannot ignore — the car does something wrong in your hands and the event has a clear date attached to it.
Why are electrical faults reported so slowly?
Because they present as intermittent annoyances before they become dangerous. A window that works sometimes or a dashboard warning that clears itself does not feel like a safety defect, so people live with it. Average delay is 165 days — the slowest of any major component — while 9.3% of electrical complaints involve a fire.
Does a delayed complaint still matter?
Yes. Regulators look for patterns across many reports rather than reacting to single ones, so a late complaint still contributes to the count that triggers an investigation. But the delay pushes back the point at which a pattern becomes visible, which is why slow-reported components tend to be recalled later in their life.
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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