Consumer Safety Complaints

Search 2,245,377 safety complaints filed by vehicle owners with NHTSA, including 140,173 crashes, 56,794 fires, and 8,580 deaths.

2,245,377 Total Complaints
140,173 Reported Crashes
56,794 Reported Fires
8,580 Reported Deaths

What is a NHTSA consumer complaint?

A consumer complaint is a free-form report filed by a vehicle owner directly to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) describing a safety concern about their vehicle. NHTSA collects these reports through its Vehicle Owner Defect Report (VOQ) system and publishes them publicly. Each complaint includes the affected component, the date and circumstances of the incident, whether the failure caused a crash or fire, and any reported injuries or deaths. The owner's full narrative description is included verbatim, NHTSA does not edit or moderate the descriptions.

The database below contains over 2,245,377 individual complaints. NHTSA's investigators monitor it for clusters of similar reports, when enough owners describe the same failure mode on the same vehicle, NHTSA may open a Preliminary Evaluation that can lead to a recall. Many of the largest recalls in U.S. history, including the Takata airbag recall and the Hyundai/Kia engine fire recalls, started as patterns visible in this complaint database years before they became formal recalls.

How to interpret what you read

A few principles for reading consumer complaints usefully:

  • One complaint is anecdote; a hundred similar complaints is data. NHTSA does not investigate the truthfulness of any individual report, that's the job of the Office of Defects Investigation, which looks at the full pattern. When evaluating a vehicle, look for whether multiple owners describe the same chain of events.
  • Crash, fire, injury, and death flags are owner-set. They are not verified by NHTSA. They are still useful as a filter, because owners who tick those boxes are typically reporting more serious incidents than those who don't.
  • Component categories are NHTSA-assigned, not owner-assigned. NHTSA standardizes the component field so that complaints can be aggregated. The owner narrative often goes into more detail than the component category captures.
  • Complaint volume scales with sales volume. A best-selling model will accumulate more raw complaints than a niche model even at the same defect rate. To compare across vehicles, look at complaints per 100,000 units sold, not raw counts.

If you've experienced a defect

File a complaint. NHTSA's investigators rely on this database to detect emerging defects, and useful complaints, specific, concrete, with dates and mileage and clear descriptions of what happened, feed directly into the agency's pattern detection. The form takes about 10 minutes and is at nhtsa.gov/recalls under "Report a Safety Problem." Your complaint becomes part of the same public record that this page is built from. Owners filing detailed VOQs are how recalls get triggered.

Read more from our blog

How to Read NHTSA Consumer Complaints › How NHTSA Investigations Work › Used Car: 7 Recall Checks to Run First › The Takata Airbag Recall: Full Story › OBD-II Codes Explained › All Articles ›
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Showing 5 complaints for E-ONE

E-ONE F550 (2006) - AIR BAGS Oct 3, 2018
Incident date: Sep 30, 2018
TAKATA RECALL REPLACED ICP AND PIGTAIL BUT NO CHANGE IN LIGHT BEING ABLE TO BE RESET...... ABS IS ON FOR SOME REASON SHOP CAN'T FIND A REASON WHY!!!!!
E-ONE F550 (2006) - ELECTRICAL SYSTEM Oct 3, 2018
Incident date: Sep 30, 2018
TAKATA RECALL REPLACED ICP AND PIGTAIL BUT NO CHANGE IN LIGHT BEING ABLE TO BE RESET...... ABS IS ON FOR SOME REASON SHOP CAN'T FIND A REASON WHY!!!!!
E-ONE F550 (2006) - FUEL/PROPULSION SYSTEM Oct 3, 2018
Incident date: Sep 30, 2018
TAKATA RECALL REPLACED ICP AND PIGTAIL BUT NO CHANGE IN LIGHT BEING ABLE TO BE RESET...... ABS IS ON FOR SOME REASON SHOP CAN'T FIND A REASON WHY!!!!!
E-ONE FIRE TRUCK (2004) - SUSPENSION:REAR Apr 2, 2009
Incident date: Feb 25, 2009
THE COTTLEVILLE FIRE DISTRICT HAS 4 2004 E-ONE PUMPERS. ALL HAVE REAR SPACERS BETWEEN THE FRAME AND THE U-BOLT THAT HAVE FAILED IN THE SAME MANOR. THE HOLLOW SPACERS HAVE CRUSHED AND COME APART. OUR FIRST TRUCK SUSTAINED THE MOST DAMAGE WHEN THE SUSPENSION SHIFTED AND SHEARED THE AIR RIDE BOLTS DUE TO THE FAILURE OF THE SPACERS. ALL FOUR OF THE PUMPERS/ENGINES HAVE HAD THE REAR SUSPENSION SHIFT DU... Read more
E-ONE C2 (2005) - ELECTRICAL SYSTEM: INSTRUMENT CLUSTER/PANEL Aug 19, 2008
Incident date: Aug 8, 2008
ON A BIG RIG/18 WHEELER DOES THE SPEED ODOMETER HAVE TO BE WORKING TO DRIVE IT OFF OF THE TERMINAL YARD? PLEASE EXPLAIN. *TR