Two in Five Complaints Mention the Dealer. 7,186 Say the Fault Could Not Be Reproduced.
Complaint text is usually mined for what broke. Reading it for who the owner dealt with produces a different picture: in two cases out of five, the visit to the dealer is the thing being described.
25,641 Cars Caught Fire Without Crashing. Only 1,239 Burned After a Crash.
Car fires are filed under crash safety in most people's heads. In the complaint record they are almost entirely a separate phenomenon: the overwhelming majority start with no impact of any kind.
After a Death, the Complaint Takes 467 Days. After a Fire, 179.
We have measured the reporting delay by component before. Sorting the same million records by what actually happened to the people involved reverses the expected order completely.
Tyres Fail at 60 MPH. Brakes Fail at 35.
Owners almost always remember how fast they were going. Extracted across a hundred thousand reports, those numbers turn out to describe each component's failure mode more precisely than the fault text does.
Lemon Law Comes Up at 2.5 Years. Lawyers at 6.6. NHTSA at 7.3.
When something goes wrong, owners reach for whatever remedy is available at that moment. Which one they name turns out to date the car almost as precisely as the odometer.
A Burning Smell Means Fire 12x More Often. Grinding Means It Less.
Symptoms are not interchangeable warnings. Sorted by what actually happened next, they split cleanly into two groups — and the group people take least seriously is the dangerous one.
A Fault on the Motorway Crashes 5% of the Time. At a Junction, 13%.
Owners describe where the fault happened, and the location turns out to predict the outcome better than the fault does. The dangerous place is not the one going fastest.
36,815 Owners Say the Same Fault Came Back After Repair
A repair either works or it does not, and the complaint database records a large number that did not. What makes these different from ordinary faults is that somebody had already been paid to solve them.
70,474 Complaints End With the Car on a Flatbed
A breakdown is not the same as a defect, and most faults never strand anyone. These are the ones that did — and the age at which they did it is younger than most people would guess.
53,811 Complaints Describe a Dealer Refusing to Fix the Car
The warranty covers the car. What it does not cover is a fault that behaves itself in the service bay, and the complaint record is full of people caught in exactly that gap.
Owners Reported 69,978 Repair Bills. The Median Is $1,000.
Repair cost guides are built from labour rates and parts catalogues. This is built from what owners said they actually paid, written at the moment they were angry enough to file a federal complaint.
24,701 Complaints Mention a Spouse. 875 Mention Being Pregnant.
A complaint form asks what failed. A large number of people answer by explaining who was sitting next to them, which turns out to change how the report reads and what it is useful for.