Complaints are usually filed while the owner still has the car and still wants it fixed. A smaller group is filed after they gave up.
| What the owner wrote | Complaints |
|---|---|
| Traded the car in | 1,372 |
| Would never buy the brand again | 1,027 |
| Sold it | 792 |
| Got rid of it | 100 |
Just over three thousand reports describe the owner disposing of the car rather than repairing it.
The economics of giving up
Selling because of a fault is the most expensive way to solve it, and people do it anyway.
The reason is that an unresolved intermittent fault has no defined cost. A repair has a price you can decide about. A fault the dealer could not reproduce has an unbounded one — it might be nothing, it might be every month for as long as you own the car, and there is no way to find out except by continuing to own it.
Trading it in converts that open-ended risk into a single known loss. That is a rational trade even when the loss is large.
What it does to the price
A defect that makes people sell shows up twice in the market: once as extra supply, once as a reputation.
Our pricing data shows the effect is real but selective. A transmission problem costs about 14% of the car's value; an airbag problem costs almost nothing. The difference is whether the buyer expects to pay for it. A transmission is the buyer's problem. An airbag recall is the manufacturer's, and it is free to fix.
So the faults that drive owners to sell are not the dangerous ones. They are the expensive ones.
"Never again" is the more interesting number
1,027 complaints contain a version of "I will never buy this brand again". That is a customer-retention statement filed with a federal safety regulator, which is not what the form is for.
It usually appears alongside a repair dispute rather than a crash. Almost nobody writes it about a fault that got fixed promptly, however serious. It appears when the fault was minor and the process was long.
If you are on the buying side of this
Cars sold because of an unresolved fault re-enter the market with the fault intact and no obligation on anyone to mention it.
That is the specific scenario a history check exists for. Two things are worth doing before money moves: read the complaint text for that model and year to see whether a known intermittent fault exists, and run the VIN for open recalls — because if the fault happens to be under a recall, the repair is free and the discount you negotiated is pure profit.
Frequently asked questions
How many people sell a car because of a defect?
In the complaint record, just over three thousand reports describe disposal rather than repair: 1,372 traded the car in, 792 sold it, and 100 wrote that they got rid of it.
Why sell instead of repairing?
Because an unresolved intermittent fault has no defined cost. A quoted repair is a decision you can make; a fault that cannot be reproduced might cost nothing or recur monthly for years. Trading in converts an open-ended risk into one known loss.
Do faults that make owners sell reduce the car's value?
Selectively. A transmission problem costs roughly 14% of value because the buyer expects to pay for it. An airbag problem costs almost nothing, because the repair falls under recall and is free — so the faults that drive owners away are the expensive ones, not the dangerous ones.
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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