703 Seat Complaints Involved a Fire. The Seat Wasn't the Problem.
Nobody expects the seat to be a fire risk. It burns more often than the fuel system does, for a reason that has nothing to do with what the seat is made of and everything to do with what was added to it.
Rust Complaints Fell 41%. The Ones Left Are Structural.
Bodywork corrosion largely stopped being the thing that kills cars. What replaced it is less visible and more expensive: rust in the places holding the suspension on.
1,930 Complaints Describe a Door Opening While Driving
A door latch is the least glamorous part of a car and one of the few whose failure has no intermediate state. It either holds or it does not, and the complaints describe what happens when it does not.
One Petrol System Complaint in 23 Involves a Fire
Fuel system faults sound uniformly alarming. Split by which part of the system failed and the risk separates cleanly into two groups — and only one of them is about fire.
Airbag Complaints Carry 28,165 Injuries. Nothing Else Is Close.
The device that has saved more lives than any other addition to a car also generates the largest injury total in the complaint record. Both facts are true at once, and the second one has a specific cause.
One Recall Covered 71 Different Models at Once
A recall usually means one manufacturer found one problem in one vehicle. Occasionally it means something else entirely, and those are the campaigns that reach across brands that compete with each other.
July Breaks More Cars Than April. By 25%.
Car failures are not spread evenly across the year. Sorting a million incidents by month produces a shape with two peaks, and both of them are about temperature rather than mileage.
Sudden Acceleration Reports Tripled in 2010. Then They Faded.
Unintended acceleration is the most contested failure in motoring. The complaint record does not settle the argument, but it does show something clear: reports of it follow the news as much as they follow the cars.
Every 250kg Cuts Injury Claims by About 9%. Someone Pays.
The protective effect of mass is usually argued from anecdote. Put measured kerb weights against claim frequencies and it becomes a clean line — along with the cost, which lands on somebody else entirely.
25 Cars Lost a Crash Star Between Model Years
A car that scored five stars last year is assumed to score five this year. Usually true, and the exceptions are informative: they cluster in two specific tests and almost never in the third.
Even the Sticker Recalls Say "Risk of a Crash"
Some recalls sound trivial. A wrong number on a sticker, a missing line in the manual. We went looking for the harmless category and could not really find one, which says something about how the threshold works.
Rollover Stars Fall a Full Point for Every 50cm of Height
Of the three crash tests, one is not really a test of engineering at all. It is a measurement of shape, and you can predict the result from a tape measure before the vehicle reaches the track.