The Five Most Complained-About Cars Are All Fords

Owners can file a complaint with NHTSA about any vehicle, free, at any time. It's the closest thing America has to a public record of what actually goes wrong with cars. I ranked every model year in our data by how many it collected.

Five out of five. No other manufacturer appears until further down the table.

Three things inflate this list, and one of them is real

Volume comes first. Ford sold these cars in colossal numbers — the Focus and Fusion were among the best-selling vehicles in the country in their years. More cars on the road means more owners, means more complaints, before anything mechanical enters the picture. A raw count rewards popularity as much as it punishes faults.

Age comes second. A 2000 Focus has had twenty-six years to accumulate reports. A 2024 model has had months. Every one of these five is at least fourteen years old.

And then there's the real part. These specific cars do have well-documented, expensive faults, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The 2012 Focus and its dual-clutch automatic became one of the most litigated transmissions in modern American motoring. The 2010 Fusion attracted heavy volumes about steering and electrical faults. The 2002 Explorer arrived in the aftermath of the tyre and rollover scandal that reshaped the entire SUV segment.

So: the ranking exaggerates, but it isn't inventing anything.

Why we don't rank brands this way

This is the same trap as counting recalls. We wrote about it when Ford turned out to have more recalls than any other brand — a number that mostly measures how many vehicles a company sells and how diligently it reports.

Our own reliability score deliberately doesn't use raw complaint totals for exactly this reason. It weighs complaint severity and normalises against the model, so a car that sold five million units isn't automatically ranked below one that sold fifty thousand.

What's actually useful here

Not the total. The component.

Every complaint is filed against a system — engine, transmission, electrical, airbags. On any specific car, the pattern of what owners report is far more informative than how many reported it. A thousand complaints spread evenly across ten systems is an old, popular car. Four hundred complaints all naming the transmission is a warning.

That's the view worth having before you buy, and it's on every model page we publish, alongside the recall history and the year-by-year breakdown. We also mapped the signature failure of each brand — the one system its owners complain about more than any other.

If you're looking at one of these five

None of them is unbuyable. All of them are cheap now, and a well-kept example with the known fault already fixed can be a sensible purchase — the repair has been done, documented and paid for by someone else.

The way to tell is the paperwork. Get the VIN, run a free VIN check to see which recalls are still open on that specific car, and ask directly whether the transmission or steering work was done. On a 2012 Focus that single question is worth more than the entire complaint count above.