The complaint form asks for a description of the defect. It does not ask who was in the car.
People say anyway, and often it is the first thing they say.
| Mentioned in the text | Complaints |
|---|---|
| A spouse | 24,701 |
| A son or daughter | 11,753 |
| A grandchild | 2,494 |
| Being pregnant | 875 |
Roughly one complaint in forty-five names a spouse. One in ninety-four names a child.
Why people include it
A defect report is a document nobody reads for pleasure, submitted to an agency, describing a mechanical event. Mentioning your daughter is not evidence of anything and does not strengthen the technical case.
It is included because the owner is not only reporting a fault. They are registering that it mattered, and severity to a person is not measured in component numbers.
It also works, in a narrow sense. A report saying the seatback collapsed reads as a specification failure. A report saying it collapsed onto the child behind it describes the same event and communicates the consequence. Both are in the record; only one of them is hard to skim past.
These reports behave differently
Complaints naming another occupant are longer than average and more likely to describe the sequence rather than the part. They also cluster in specific components: seats, seat belts, air bags and door latches — the systems whose failure directly involves a person rather than the car.
That matches what the numbers show elsewhere. Airbags produce an injury in 17.2% of their complaints, far above any other component, and airbag reports are among the most likely to name who was sitting there.
The 875
Eight hundred and seventy-five complaints mention the writer being pregnant. Almost all concern airbags, seat belt geometry, or a seat that moved.
It is a small number that points at a real gap: crash protection is validated against standard dummy sizes, and a pregnant driver is not one of them. The practical guidance is unchanged and worth repeating — the lap belt goes under the bump, across the hips, never across it — but the complaints are people reporting from outside the range of what was tested.
The same is true of the 2,494 mentioning grandchildren, which are overwhelmingly about child seat anchors being impossible to reach, filed by people fitting a seat occasionally rather than daily — the same population behind the injuries recorded in complaints mentioning children.
How to read the record because of this
When you look up a model, the counts tell you how often something happens and the text tells you what it does to whoever is in the car.
Both are in the same complaint history, and the second is the part almost nobody opens. For a family car it is the more useful half.
Frequently asked questions
Do complaint forms ask who was in the car?
No. The form asks for a description of the defect. People add it themselves — 24,701 complaints mention a spouse, 11,753 a son or daughter, and 2,494 a grandchild.
Why does it matter who is mentioned?
It changes what the report communicates. A seatback that collapses is a specification failure; a seatback that collapses onto the child behind it is the same event with the consequence attached. These reports also cluster in seats, belts, airbags and latches — the systems whose failure directly involves a person.
What do the complaints mentioning pregnancy describe?
Almost all concern airbags, seat belt geometry or a seat that shifted. Crash protection is validated against standard dummy sizes, and a pregnant driver falls outside that range. Standard guidance remains that the lap belt goes under the bump and across the hips, never across it.
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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