What breaks, and at what mileage

Most reliability sites count complaints. The count tells you a car has a problem; it does not tell you whether that problem arrives at 3,000 miles or at 130,000 — and those are completely different cars to own. Of 2,116,934 complaints in this dataset, 1,108,272 record the mileage at which the failure occurred, which is enough to show the distribution.

That distinction does real work. On the 2010–2015 Toyota Prius, the hydraulic brake circuit draws complaints at a median of 3,500 miles while the brakes as a whole draw them at 87,000 — two separate problems sharing one name in the database, with no overlap between the middle half of each. Every generation page here breaks the timing out by system, so that difference is visible rather than averaged away.