Every verdict on MotorJury is built on one dataset: the complaints that owners file with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the recall campaigns manufacturers file with the same agency. It is public, free, and enormous — more than four hundred thousand complaints are indexed on this site — and it is easy to misread. This guide explains what the numbers mean, so that the model pages make sense.
What a complaint is
A complaint is a form an owner fills in at nhtsa.gov describing a problem with their car: the vehicle, the mileage, the component, whether there was a crash, a fire or an injury, and a free-text account. The agency does not verify it. It publishes it, and it uses the aggregate to decide where to open investigations. A complaint therefore tells you that one owner believed something was wrong; a thousand complaints about the same component on the same model year tell you something is wrong.
Because the form is free, the count is shaped by who bothers to fill it in. Owners of expensive cars file more than owners of cheap ones. Owners with a problem that a dealer will not fix under warranty file far more than owners whose problem was fixed. A defect that reaches the news — a fire, a rollaway, a class action — produces a wave of filings from owners who had not filed before. And a car that has been on the road for ten years has had ten years in which to accumulate complaints, while a car sold last year has had one.
What MotorJury does with it
Three corrections make the raw count usable. The first is exposure: every count is divided by the number of years the model year has been on sale, so that a 2012 car with 600 complaints over thirteen years and a 2024 car with 100 over one year are compared as 46 a year against 100 a year. The second is volume: a Camry sells four times as many cars as a Sonata, so the score compares each year against the other years of the same nameplate, where sales volume is roughly constant, rather than against every car on the road. The third is confidence: a verdict on fewer than fifty complaints is labelled thin evidence and pulled toward the average, so that a year with almost no record is not shown as excellent. The full formula is on the methodology page, and it is recomputed from the raw records every night.
How to read a model-year page
Start with the complaint count and the confidence label together. A score of 90 on strong evidence means a car with a deep record and few problems; a score of 90 on thin evidence means a car nobody has complained about yet, which is not the same. Then read the component breakdown: a car whose complaints are eighty per cent one component has one problem, which is usually well understood and often has a recall or a warranty extension attached; a car whose complaints are spread across ten components has a build-quality problem, which does not. Then read the owner narratives quoted on the page. Three verbatim complaints tell you what the failure actually feels like from the driver's seat, which is what you need on a test drive.
What a recall means
A recall is the opposite of a complaint: it is the manufacturer's admission, filed with the agency, that a defect exists and will be fixed free of charge. A model year with several recalls is not necessarily a bad car — a recall means the problem has a remedy — but a recall that has not been performed on the specific car you are looking at is an open defect. Check the VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls before you buy; it is free and it takes thirty seconds. This site's VIN check page does the same lookup.
Not every defect becomes a recall. Manufacturers use warranty extensions, customer-satisfaction programmes and technical service bulletins for problems they would rather not call safety defects, and those do not appear in the recall count. The Honda CR-V's oil dilution, the Ford Explorer's exhaust odour and the Subaru oil consumption are all in the complaint record and not in the recall record, which is why this site scores on both.
What the data cannot do
It cannot tell you about the particular car in front of you. A model year with a bad record contains many individual cars that have had the defect fixed, and a model year with a good record contains individual cars that have been crashed, flooded and neglected. The record tells you where to look; it does not look for you. Use it to choose the year, then have the car inspected.
Summary
Read the count with the confidence label. Read the component breakdown to see whether it is one problem or many. Check the VIN for open recalls. Then go and drive it.