About FaultScore

When something goes wrong with a car in the United States, its owner can file a complaint with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA publishes every one of them, going back to 1995.

It is an extraordinary public record and a nearly unusable one. It is a 2,151,276-row file of raw text. There is no way to ask it the question anyone actually has, which is some version of: is the year of this car I am about to buy the bad one?

FaultScore reads that file every day and answers that question. It groups the complaints by model year, works out which years drew more than their share, which part was responsible, how often the failure hurt somebody, and at what mileage it tended to happen.

What we will not do

We do not rank one make against another on complaint counts, because the data cannot support it — see the method for why. We do not publish photographs of cars that are not the car in question. We do not grade a model year on a handful of complaints and call it a measurement.

Being wrong in a way that sounds confident is worse than saying nothing, on a subject where the reader is about to spend thousands of dollars.

The source

All data comes from the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation public files and public APIs. FaultScore is independent and not affiliated with NHTSA or any vehicle manufacturer. The site is free and paid for by advertising.