When each system tends to fail
Every complaint carries the date the owner says the failure happened. Measured against the model year, that gives the age of the car when it broke — pooled here across 73 vehicles. The pattern is consistent enough to plan around: the expensive systems surface after the original warranty has run out, while the safety-related ones surface inside it.
| System | Median age at failure | Inside first 3 years | Reports |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engine | 5 years | 24% | 14,353 |
| Electrical system | 4.8 years | 31% | 11,906 |
| Power train | 4.4 years | 33% | 10,505 |
| Unknown or other | 4.8 years | 29% | 7,857 |
| Service brakes | 4.2 years | 39% | 7,584 |
| Steering | 4.7 years | 33% | 6,242 |
| Air bags | 4.3 years | 34% | 3,679 |
| Structure | 3.7 years | 42% | 3,474 |
Medians of unverified owner reports, not failure rates — they say when the people who complained say it broke, not how likely a break is. A component has to appear on at least eight vehicles to be listed, so no single outlier sets a figure.
The most-recalled vehicles on the site
Across 73 vehicles the federal record holds 613 recall campaigns and 63,160 complaints. A long recall list is not automatically a bad sign: it means the manufacturer acknowledged faults and owes a remedy at no charge, and the campaigns below have almost all been fixed on most cars. What matters is whether they were fixed on the one you are buying.
Browse every vehicle
A recall and a complaint are not the same thing
A recall is a manufacturer-acknowledged defect that the maker must remedy at no charge, and it applies to a range of production dates rather than to a whole model year. Two cars built weeks apart can differ on whether a campaign touches them at all, which is why the only reliable answer comes from the VIN.
That no-charge obligation has a limit worth knowing before you rely on it. Under 49 U.S.C. §30120(g) it does not apply where the vehicle was bought by its first owner more than 15 calendar years before the recall was announced — five years for tires. On the older model years listed here, a recently announced campaign may carry no free-repair right, even though the recall itself still stands.
A complaint is one owner’s account, filed without inspection or verification. It carries no legal weight and no confirmation — but in volume, complaints show where a design tends to give trouble long before any recall is issued, and often where no recall is ever issued at all.
What this cannot tell you
Nothing here describes the car in front of you. These pages describe a model year in aggregate; condition, service history and previous accident repair decide far more about a specific used car than anything in the federal record.
The record also stops at safety. It holds no title brands, no odometer history and no accident data — a car can have a spotless NHTSA record and a salvage title. Those live in a title-record check, which is a different search entirely.