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Car complaints · off NHTSA’s own register

Car complaints on file
at NHTSA, counted.

Choose a model year, a make and a model from NHTSA’s own list. Every owner complaint NHTSA holds for it is read and counted in your browser — the complaints that report a crash or a fire, the injuries and deaths owners reported, and the components they name most — and every one of them can be read as it was filed, the newest first, ten at a time.

Pick a car File a complaint Where it comes from

The lookup

A year, a make, a model — then every complaint.

NHTSA’s complaint register

the lists

The lists are read from api.nhtsa.gov as the page opens.

The lists are NHTSA’s complaint register: every vehicle with at least one owner complaint on file, so a model with none is not in them.

Owner complaints

waiting for a car

Choose a year, a make and a model above, then press Count the complaints. A popular model’s complaints come in one large answer; allow it a few seconds.

Reading them

One owner’s account, not a finding.

What an NHTSA complaint is

Someone who has had a safety problem with a vehicle, a tire, a car seat or equipment can report it to NHTSA. NHTSA says each complaint is added to a public database after personally identifying information is removed, and that the complaints are used, with other data, to find safety issues that warrant investigation and to judge whether a defect trend exists. It describes the path in three stages: complaints, then investigations, then recalls — similar reports from a number of people about the same product could point to a defect worth an investigation.

That is also the measure of what a complaint is not. It is one owner’s account of a problem that, in NHTSA’s words, “could be a safety defect” — not a finding that it is one.

How to read the counts

  • Complaints is the number of reports NHTSA returned for the year, make and model.
  • Reporting a crash and reporting a fire count the complaints in which the owner marked one.
  • Injuries and deaths are the sums of the numbers owners entered.
  • Components are NHTSA’s categories. One complaint can name several, so the component counts add up to more than the total.

A count is not a rate. A model sold in large numbers, or one that has been on the road for twenty years, collects more complaints than a rare or recent one. NHTSA’s feed does not say how many of a model were sold, so this page does not compute a rate and does not rank models against each other.

Filing a complaint of your own

Complaints are filed with NHTSA, not here: online at its report-a-safety-problem page, or by calling its Vehicle Safety Hotline on 888-327-4236. Have the VIN to hand; the VIN Decoder checks that it is well formed first. To see whether the fault already has a remedy, read the model’s recall campaigns.

Method

What is fetched, what is counted here, and what is not.

The source

NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation, read straight from your browser (it allows it): api.nhtsa.gov/products/vehicle/modelYears, …/makes and …/models with issueType=c — the vehicles its complaint register holds — then api.nhtsa.gov/complaints/complaintsByVehicle for the one picked. Keyless, public, federal government work, free to reuse.

Counted and written here

Every total — complaints, crashes, fires, injuries, deaths — and the component tally, counted from NHTSA’s answer in your browser; the complaints themselves newest filed first, ten drawn and ten more a press, to the last one. Dates are spelled out from NHTSA’s month-first form, with the string it sent kept on each date. NHTSA dates no answer as a whole, so the panel prints the time it was read by your clock and the newest complaint inside it.

The limits

NHTSA returns all of a model’s complaints in one answer, and the page reads the whole of it before it can count: the 2003 Honda Accord’s was about 2 MB when read on 28 September 2026. The page waits up to 45 seconds, tries once more, and then says api.nhtsa.gov did not answer. The lists hold only vehicles with at least one complaint on file. Each complaint in NHTSA’s feed carries the first characters of the complainant’s VIN; this page does not show them.

What is sent

A year, a make and a model, to api.nhtsa.gov — no VIN is asked for on this page and nothing passes through labs.llc. “Copy a link to this model” puts the year, make and model after a # in the address; such a link, and drive.com.im’s older ones, open the same lookup here and are taken out of the address as soon as they are read. The site’s analytics records that the tool was used, never what was chosen.

Not legal, mechanical or buying advice. Questions and corrections: labs@labs.llc.