How this is counted

A complaint is one ODI number, not one row

NHTSA's complaint file holds one row per component a complaint names, so a single complaint about a stall that the owner filed against the engine, the electrical system and the power train occupies three rows. Counting rows would inflate every figure here by about a third.

The check that settles it: the 2021 Toyota RAV4 occupies 519 rows in the flat file and 382 distinct ODI numbers, and NHTSA's own API reports 382 complaints for that vehicle. This site counts distinct ODI numbers, so its totals match the agency's.

One consequence is visible on every vehicle page: the per-system tallies add up to more than the vehicle's total, because a complaint naming three systems is counted under all three. Each page says so where the table sits.

Crashes, fires and deaths are counted once per complaint

The same de-duplication applies to everything a complaint asserts. A fatal crash reported against three components is one crash and one death, not three. This matters most on exactly the pages where it would be worst to get wrong.

What is left out

• Non-vehicle complaints. Tires, child restraints and loose equipment have their own complaint records. Folding them in would put a car seat failure under the car.
• Unattributable vehicles. NHTSA writes "UNKNOWN" when the caller could not name the vehicle, and marks some records "REDUNDANT" during its own de-duplication. Neither can be assigned to a vehicle with confidence, so both are dropped rather than guessed at.
• Model years before 2010. A commercial judgement, not a data one: the file goes back to 1995 and the pages do not.

Which vehicles get a page

A vehicle is published when it has something to say: at least thirty complaints, or at least eight alongside a recall or a defect investigation. Below that a page is a heading over an empty table, and a few thousand of those would be worse than not having them. 4,189 vehicles currently qualify, carrying 624,908 complaints between them.

Spelling and grouping

Makes and models are free text typed by whoever took the complaint, so one car arrives as "4RUNNER" and "4 RUNNER", as "F-150", "F 150" and "F150". Grouping is done on a key with the punctuation and spacing removed, so those land on one page rather than three. The name shown is the most common original spelling, re-cased for reading: the source file is entirely in capitals.

Whether complaints are rising

Where a vehicle page says complaints rose or fell, it is comparing two equal twelve-month windows, both closed, ending a full quarter before the present because complaints keep arriving about periods already past.

The comparison is only made when all of the following hold:

• The vehicle is at least four model years old. Every model year climbs for its first few years as the fleet ages and mileage accumulates, and reporting that as a finding would put a false alarm on thousands of pages.
• Both windows carry at least six complaints. Two becoming six is a tripling by arithmetic and noise by any other reading.
• The change is more than 25%. Anything smaller is called flat.

Where they do not hold, the page reports no trend. That is a real answer, not a gap.

What this site will not claim

• That one car is more reliable than another. Complaint counts follow sales as much as they follow defects, and NHTSA does not publish sales. Nothing here divides by them, so nothing here is a ranking.
• That a complaint is true. These are unverified accounts by the people who filed them. NHTSA does not vouch for them and neither does this site.
• That a vehicle has no recall. Where no recall matched, the page says none was matched to that year, make and model, which is weaker than saying there is none. Recalls cover production ranges and the only reliable check is a VIN.
• That a do-not-drive warning is current for your car. Those advisories attach to a recall and are discharged by the repair. Most of the ones on this site are Takata inflator campaigns from 2016 to 2019 whose remedy has been available for years, which is why the wording everywhere says "unrepaired".

Which complaints are quoted

Vehicle pages quote a handful of complaints verbatim, the ones involving a fire, an injury or a death first. Two changes are made to the text: links are stripped, and complaints whose narrative still carries someone's contact details after NHTSA's redaction are not quoted at all. Both are about people who did not ask to be republished; neither changes any count, and every complaint remains on nhtsa.gov.

How current the data is

• Complaint file published Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:32:35 GMT.
• Investigation file published Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:19:26 GMT.
• Most recent recall campaign filed 2026-08-12.

Dates are the ones the source files carry, not the time this site was last built. The sources themselves are listed separately, with the exact files and endpoints.