What Goes Wrong With Your Car
Every year thousands of owners file complaints with the federal government about their vehicles. Enter your VIN — or just pick the year, make and model — and we’ll show you what owners of your exact car report breaking, ranked by how often. Free, no email required.
Enter a VIN, or pick year / make / model
Owner complaints, filed with the government
When something goes wrong and an owner thinks it’s a safety problem, they can file a complaint with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Those complaints are public. When hundreds of them pile up against the same system on the same model, that’s a pattern worth knowing about.
This is not the same thing as a recall. A recall is a defect the manufacturer has been made to fix. A complaint is one owner’s account of what happened to them — sometimes the first sign of a problem years before a recall, sometimes just a bad day.
Not sure what the symptom even is? Try the Pablos Smart Diag guided diagnostic. Checking for open recalls too? Run the free VIN recall check.
Two good reasons to look
You’re buying. Before you hand over money for a used car, spend thirty seconds finding out that this model year has four hundred brake complaints against it. That’s leverage on price, or a reason to walk.
You already own it. If the thing your car is doing right now shows up in the top three systems for your model, you’re not imagining it and you’re not alone. It also tells us where to look first.
What the numbers do and don’t mean
- A high count often means the model sold in huge numbers, not that it’s unreliable — a common truck will always out-complain a rare coupe
- What matters more is the shape: which system dominates the list for your car
- Complaints are self-reported, so every count here is a floor, never a total
- One complaint can name several systems, so the percentages add up past 100
- Nothing here is specific to your car — it describes the year, make and model
The lookup runs in your browser and goes straight to NHTSA. We don’t store the VINs entered here.
We’ll come read the codes and tell you straight
Knowing the pattern narrows it down. Confirming it takes a scan tool and a drive. We come to your house, your job, or wherever it’s sitting — anywhere in the Valley.