Complaints Mentioning Snow Involve a Crash 12% of the Time. The Overall Rate Is 5.8%.
A fault that is survivable on dry tarmac is often not survivable on snow. The complaint record quantifies that gap, and it is larger than any other condition we can isolate in the text.
Lincoln Complaints Involve a Death Twice as Often as Toyota's. Age Explains Most of It.
A rate looks more rigorous than a count, which is exactly why it misleads more easily. Here is what happens when you divide fatal complaints by total complaints, and why the result is not a safety ranking.
The Average Jeep Fails Three Safety Tests. The Average Mazda Fails None.
Any single safety test can be an outlier. Counting failures across six separate evaluations per vehicle removes that excuse, and the results separate the market far more sharply than any individual score.
25 MPG Scored 6.4 Out of 10 in 2012. Today It Scores 5.1.
The number out of ten on the window sticker looks like a rating of the car. It is a rating of the car against everything else on sale that year, and the comparison set keeps improving.
One Airbag Complaint in Six Reports an Injury. For Brakes It Is One in Thirty-Four.
Which car part hurts people most depends entirely on whether you count injuries or measure the odds. One question ranks by how often a part is fitted. The other ranks by what happens when it fails.
The Average Complaint Grew From 156 Characters to 572. A Death Does Not Make It Longer.
How much somebody writes about a car fault turns out to have almost nothing to do with how bad the fault was. It tracks the keyboard they were sitting at.
One Toyota Complaint in Ten Involves a Crash. Across All Brands, One in Sixteen.
Some brands generate complaints about warning lights. Others generate complaints about accidents. The ratio between them is stable enough to mean something, and it is not a ranking of how safe the cars are.
95% of Dealers Sell One Brand. The Exceptions Are Almost All Stellantis.
The franchised dealer model is usually described as one brand, one building. It mostly is — and the places where it breaks explain a distortion that shows up in every count of dealers by brand.
The First Year of a New Model Gets 5% Fewer Recalls, Not More
Every buying guide repeats it: wait for the second year, let them fix the problems. We have the recall and complaint history for hundreds of models, so the rule is testable — and it does not survive.
Flex-Fuel Peaked at 689 Models. Now It Is Gone.
A technology fitted to hundreds of models disappeared inside a decade, and almost nobody noticed because most of the cars that had it never used it. The reason it existed explains why it stopped.
73% of BMW Z4 Complaints Are About One Thing
A complaint count tells you how much trouble a model generates. The shape of those complaints tells you what kind — and for some models the answer is overwhelmingly one component.
One GMC Sierra Weighs 2,000kg. Another, Same Year, Weighs 3,919.
A model name is treated as if it described a vehicle. On the specification sheets it frequently describes a range, and the range on some models is wider than the gap between entire vehicle classes.