Which model years to avoid
Complaint records for 57 common models, compared against each model's own history rather than against other cars. The numbers, not a verdict.
A raw complaint count says little: an older car has had longer to accumulate them, and a popular one draws more at equal reliability. What survives both is a year that stands out against its own nameplate. Of the 57 models here, 43 have at least one year that does.
This is a fault record, not a review
Everything below comes from complaints filed with NHTSA, and complaints are a self-selected sample. Nobody files a federal complaint to say the car has been fine. So this page can tell you what tends to go wrong on a model year and roughly how often, and it cannot tell you whether owners like the car, whether it is good value, or how it compares to a rival.
A model with no flagged year is not thereby a good car. It is a car that has not drawn an unusual number of complaints against its own history, which is a narrower claim and the only one this data supports.
Where these numbers come from
- Complaints, crash ratings, and recalls: NHTSA public APIs.
- Efficiency: the EPA fuel economy dataset.
- A year is marked when it drew at least 2.5 times its nameplate's median and at least 50 complaints. The median is used rather than an average of neighbouring years, because faults usually span two model years, and two bad years sitting side by side hide each other in an average.
- Older years have had longer to accumulate complaints, which makes this test conservative rather than generous. It will miss a marginal recent year before it invents one.
- For a flagged year, the words owners used are compared the same way: a term is reported when it appears in far more of that year's complaints than of the same model's other years. That is why "brakes" rarely appears — every year has brake complaints, so no year stands out on them.
- Quotes are verbatim from public NHTSA filings, chosen for being legible and on-topic rather than alarming, with VINs, phone numbers and emails removed.
- A recall is the manufacturer conceding a defect in writing, which makes it the firmest evidence here. An investigation means NHTSA decided the complaints warranted looking into.