NHTSA complaint analysis322 vehicle generations
Find out what breaks on your car
— and at what mileage
For any of 322 US vehicle generations: which parts owners report breaking, and at what mileage. Check a used car against its own record, not an average.
322 generations · type a model, or a year and a model
- Complaints analysed
- 878,697
- With an odometer reading
- 519,530
- Generations covered
- 322
Browse 322 generations across 29 makes
One page per make, with every generation it covers. The count is complaints that record an odometer reading — a bigger number means more cars on the road, not a worse car.
- Acura3 generations1,696 reports
- Audi4 generations1,736 reports
- BMW3 generations5,488 reports
- Buick3 generations2,854 reports
- Cadillac3 generations868 reports
- Chevrolet37 generations71,248 reports
- Chrysler7 generations15,233 reports
- Dodge12 generations31,147 reports
- Ford39 generations118,827 reports
- GMC11 generations10,463 reports
- Honda28 generations41,545 reports
- Hyundai21 generations23,198 reports
- Infiniti2 generations1,051 reports
- Jeep14 generations40,395 reports
- Kia18 generations16,335 reports
- Lexus4 generations2,225 reports
- Lincoln3 generations624 reports
- Mazda4 generations2,837 reports
- Mercedes-Benz4 generations2,961 reports
- Mercury3 generations2,029 reports
- Mitsubishi3 generations643 reports
- Nissan27 generations35,482 reports
- Oldsmobile1 generation1,052 reports
- Pontiac3 generations6,885 reports
- Saturn1 generation3,539 reports
- Subaru15 generations11,070 reports
- Toyota39 generations55,795 reports
- Volkswagen8 generations11,304 reports
- Volvo2 generations1,000 reports
One car, two answers
Both of these are brakes on the same Toyota Prius, and both are one word in the federal database. One is reported at 3,000 miles, the other at 87,000. An average of the two would describe neither, and that gap is the whole reason this site exists.
- Electronic brake controlreported earliest3,0001,000–5,500Electronic brake control: median 3,000 miles, middle half 1,000 to 5,500 miles.
- Brakesreported latest87,00035,000–128,000Brakes: median 87,000 miles, middle half 35,000 to 128,000 miles.
See the full page for this car →
What a vehicle page gives you
- Mileage at failure — every report placed at the odometer reading it carries, on all 322 generations.
- Which system, and when — the part that fails early and the part that fails late, told apart. On 321 of 322, where at least two systems carry enough reports to time them.
- The middle half, not the average — where the central 50% of reports sit. On 322 of 322.
- Recall campaigns — matched to the generation, with what the manufacturer said was wrong. On 321 of 322 that have at least one.
- Year by year — each model year with its own median, so a 2013 is not answered with a 2010.
- Before you buy — what to check on this exact generation, drawn from what owners actually reported.
What 322 generations look like together
Every generation here gets a shape, not just a number, because the shape is what a buyer can act on. Of the 322 with enough reports to describe one, 252 show failures spread across the mileage range; 60 show failures concentrated early; 10 show failures concentrated late. The most common is failures spread across the mileage range — 252 of 322 — and that is the case where no single part is at fault and the car is simply ageing.
The single biggest trap in this data is age, and the corpus shows its size. Generations that left production at least fifteen years ago report a median of 75,000 miles across 146 of them; generations that stopped within the last five years report 24,000 across 62. That is a gap of roughly 3.1×, and almost none of it is build quality — a car sold three years ago has not had time to reach a high odometer reading, so its reports cannot come from one. Every page on this site compares within an age band for that reason, and never across.
Taken together, the middle generation on this site reports its failures at 65,000 miles, and the middle half of all 322 generations falls between 42,000 and 77,000. Those numbers are useful only as a backdrop: they say where a typical generation in this corpus sits, not what any particular car will do.
Across every generation here, the most-reported system is Electrical System: 136,940 reports, 16% of the 878,642 that name a system, and it appears among the leading systems on 285 of 322 generations. A system can lead because it genuinely fails more, or because owners notice and report it more readily; nothing in this data separates those.
| System | Reports | Share | Generations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical System | 136,940 | 16% | 285 |
| Power Train | 126,411 | 14% | 247 |
| Engine | 116,715 | 13% | 199 |
| Air Bags | 90,855 | 10% | 166 |
| Steering | 85,547 | 10% | 111 |
| Other or unspecified | 70,407 | 8% | 165 |
Four questions people arrive with
“How many miles will this car last?” The honest answer is that nobody can tell you, and this site does not pretend to. What it can show is where the failures that were reported actually happened: the middle generation here reports at 65,000 miles, and every vehicle page gives that figure for one car, one model year at a time. Read it as the middle of the reports, not as a life expectancy.
“What problems does my year have?” This is the question the data answers best. Each page breaks the reports down by vehicle system, with the mileage at which each system tends to be reported, so you get a named part and a number to check an odometer against — not a score.
“Is 150,000 miles a lot?” Of the 519,530 complaints on this site that record an odometer reading, 92% were filed below 150,000 miles; 39,828 came in past it and 9,023 past 200,000, each one a car that got there. That describes reports, not your odds: a complaint is filed for only some of the cars that reach those mileages. Every vehicle page shows where its own reports sit at 60,000, 90,000, 120,000, 150,000 and 200,000 miles.
“Is this make reliable?” This one the site declines. Ranking makes against each other needs a denominator nobody publishes for free, and a count of complaints measures how readily owners file as much as how often things break. What the make pages do instead is show what fails across that maker’s vehicles and when — useful, and not the same thing as a league table.
All of this is rebuilt from a fresh federal download once a month, and the date of the snapshot behind every figure is printed on the page carrying it. Month to month the counts grow and the medians barely move: complaints keep arriving for cars built twenty years ago, because a report can be filed at any time about any age of vehicle. What does move is the newest generations, whose fleets are still accumulating mileage — another reason their figures are held apart from the rest.
None of this is a failure rate, and the site never publishes one. A rate needs a denominator — how many of each car were sold — and no free model-level production figure exists. The obvious substitute, the affected-vehicle count on recall campaigns, was tested here and rejected: it overstates by a median factor of 7.6, because most campaigns span several model years. So a generation with more reports than another may simply be a generation with more cars on the road, and that is why this site describes timing rather than ranking vehicles against each other.
Built from the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation dataset, refreshed monthly · how it is built · open data