guarledes

I build sites out of primary government data. This one exists because the interesting question about a car — what owners report going wrong with it, and whether that is getting worse — is on public file and is not published anywhere in a form a person can read.

What I do here is read NHTSA's three databases in full rather than one query at a time, join them, and write down the counting rules. That last part is most of the work. The complaint file will tell you the 2021 RAV4 has 519 complaints if you count its rows; NHTSA says 382; the difference is that a complaint occupies one row per component it names, and a site that gets that wrong is wrong on every page while looking fine.

I am not a mechanic, an engineer or a lawyer, and nothing here is advice about your own vehicle. What I can tell you is exactly where every number came from and what it does not support, which is set out in how this is counted. Where the data cannot carry a claim, the pages say so instead of estimating.

The site currently covers 4,189 vehicles from the complaint file published Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:32:35 GMT. It is rebuilt when NHTSA publishes.

Corrections are welcome and are the fastest way to improve the site: a counting rule that is wrong is wrong on thousands of pages at once. Write to contact@carsafetyrecord.com.

Elsewhere: GitHub.