One Airbag Complaint in Six Reports an Injury. For Brakes It Is One in Thirty-Four.

There are two ways to ask which car component injures people. They give different answers, and only one of them is useful for deciding what to worry about.

The first is to count injuries, which ranks components by how common they are. The second is to ask, when this part generates a complaint, how often somebody got hurt.

An airbag complaint is roughly six times more likely to involve an injury than a brake complaint.

The airbag number is not what it looks like

An airbag is the only component on the list whose normal operation involves hitting somebody. It deploys at around 200 mph into the space a person occupies, and it does that correctly.

So the 17.2% contains two entirely different populations. Some are deployments that worked as designed during a crash, where the injury is the bruising and abrasion that comes with being saved. Others are deployments with no crash at all, where the same force arrives with no reason for it — and airbags already account for 11% of every complaint filed.

The record does not cleanly separate them, which is a real limitation of reading it this way. What it does establish is that when an airbag generates a complaint, a person was usually involved — unlike most components, where the complaint is about the car.

Brakes are the opposite case

Brakes produce 42,907 complaints and the lowest injury share on the list.

That is not because brake failures are harmless. It is because most brake complaints are not failures — they are noise, vibration, premature wear, a pedal that feels wrong. Tens of thousands of complaints about a squeal dilute the small number describing something that did not stop.

The same effect appears with structure at 3.8%: most structural complaints are about rust and panel fit rather than collapse.

Tyres are the one to take seriously

Tyres sit third at 4.6%, which looks unremarkable until you pair it with a different measure: tyre complaints carry the highest death rate of any component in the record.

A moderate injury share and the highest fatality rate is a specific signature. It means tyre failures rarely produce minor harm — the outcome tends to be either nothing or catastrophic, because a failure at speed removes control instantly rather than degrading it.

What to do with this

Injury share is a useful lens for reading a model's complaint history, but it should not drive decisions on its own.

The practical version is narrower. Airbag complaints on a specific model and year are worth reading rather than counting, because the text distinguishes a deployment that worked from one that should never have happened. And any open recall touching airbags or tyres is the kind worth acting on the week you find it rather than at the next service. Checking takes a VIN and under a minute.