A complaint to the federal database has no length limit. People write as much or as little as they want, and 1,109,342 of those decisions are on record.
The average is 499 characters — about four sentences. But that average has been climbing steadily for thirty years.
| Filed in | Complaints | Average length |
|---|---|---|
| 1990s | 71,891 | 156 chars |
| 2000s | 236,147 | 428 chars |
| 2010s | 465,982 | 536 chars |
| 2020s | 335,315 | 572 chars |
Complaints are now nearly four times longer than they were in the nineties. The faults did not get four times more complicated.
The length tracks the interface, not the problem
Nineties complaints were taken by phone and typed up by somebody else, or submitted on paper. Both compress hard: a person summarising a call writes the fault, not the story.
Web forms changed that. A text box with no visible limit invites a narrative, and that is what arrived — what the owner was doing, what the car did, what the dealer said, what happened next.
For anyone reading the record this is good news. The service history now present in two complaints out of five exists only because the box got bigger, and it is searchable by model.
Severity does not affect length at all
The obvious hypothesis is that serious incidents produce longer reports. They do not.
| Type of complaint | Average length |
|---|---|
| No crash occurred | 498 chars |
| A crash occurred | 520 chars |
| Someone died | 501 chars |
A complaint describing a death is two characters longer than one describing nothing at all.
That is worth sitting with. The reports from the worst outcomes in the entire database are, on average, exactly as long as a report about a rattle.
Part of the reason is who writes them. Fatal cases take 467 days to be filed — far longer than the delay on ordinary faults — and are often submitted by a relative rather than the driver — somebody stating facts about an event they did not witness. There is less to narrate and less appetite for narrating it.
Which faults produce the most words
| Component | Average length | Complaints |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | 570 chars | 68,470 |
| Service brakes | 554 chars | 29,838 |
| Power train | 516 chars | 91,886 |
| Air bags | 423 chars | 83,836 |
| Visibility | 375 chars | 21,103 |
Engine faults produce the longest reports because they are the most ambiguous. The owner does not know what broke, so they describe everything: the noise, the smell, the speed, the repair attempts.
Visibility complaints are the shortest, and they are also the clearest. A wiper that does not work needs one sentence. There is nothing to investigate and nothing to argue about.
What this means when you read the record
Length is not severity, and the shortest reports in the database are not the least important ones — 107,798 complaints are under 100 characters, and some of them describe fires.
Read the short ones for what happened and the long ones for what it was like, and check the open recalls on the car itself before either. Both matter, and only one of them is easy to skim.
Frequently asked questions
How long is a typical vehicle complaint?
The average is 499 characters, roughly four sentences. That has grown from 156 characters in the 1990s to 572 in the 2020s, largely because complaints moved from phone and paper submissions to web forms with open text boxes.
Do serious incidents produce longer complaints?
Essentially no. Complaints where nobody was hurt average 498 characters, those involving a crash 520, and those involving a death 501. Fatal cases are often filed much later and by a relative rather than the driver, which leaves less to narrate.
Which faults generate the longest reports?
Engine faults, at 570 characters, because the owner usually cannot identify what failed and describes everything around it. Visibility complaints are shortest at 375, since a failed wiper needs one sentence.
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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