Safety and harm
Every Car With a Complaint That Reported a Death
The smallest and gravest slice of the record: 0.17% of all complaints.
3 min read · 253 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 hours ago
These are allegations made by the people who filed them, not findings of fact. NHTSA publishes complaints without verifying them, and a death recorded on a complaint has not been attributed to the vehicle by anyone official.
Across the whole file, 3,763 complaints carry a fatal complaint. The twenty-five model years below account for 390 of them — 10.4% of every one on record.
The 1996 Ford Explorer leads it with 64 fatal complaints, out of 1,818 complaints about that model year in total.
The twenty-five
| Vehicle | Fatal complaints | All complaints | Share | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D 1996 Ford Explorer | 64 | 1,818 | 3.5% | D |
| D 2000 Ford Focus | 27 | 5,152 | 0.5% | D |
| D 1997 Ford Explorer | 26 | 2,150 | 1.2% | D |
| C 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt | 21 | 1,104 | 1.9% | C |
| D 1994 Ford Explorer | 20 | 1,531 | 1.3% | D |
| D 1998 Ford Explorer | 20 | 2,374 | 0.8% | D |
| D 2006 Chevrolet Cobalt | 17 | 3,056 | 0.6% | D |
| C 2001 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 | 14 | 627 | 2.2% | C |
| C 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt | 14 | 2,231 | 0.6% | C |
| C 2001 Dodge Neon | 13 | 199 | 6.5% | C |
| F 2002 Toyota Camry | 13 | 1,183 | 1.1% | F |
| 1987 Ford Bronco | 12 | 61 | 19.7% | — |
| B 1999 Honda Cr-V | 12 | 158 | 7.6% | B |
| F 2013 Lincoln MKS | 12 | 182 | 6.6% | F |
| D 1995 Dodge Neon | 11 | 1,415 | 0.8% | D |
| F 2022 Tesla Model Y | 11 | 1,581 | 0.7% | F |
| C 2003 Pontiac Grand AM | 10 | 436 | 2.3% | C |
| D 2013 Tesla Model S | 10 | 677 | 1.5% | D |
| C 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix | 9 | 427 | 2.1% | C |
| D 2014 Tesla Model S | 9 | 546 | 1.6% | D |
| D 2021 Tesla Model 3 | 9 | 1,225 | 0.7% | D |
| D 2004 Nissan Titan | 9 | 1,295 | 0.7% | D |
| D 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee | 9 | 1,349 | 0.7% | D |
| D 1996 Chrysler Town AND Country | 9 | 1,411 | 0.6% | D |
| D 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee | 9 | 1,771 | 0.5% | D |
By share rather than by count
Re-sorted so the model years where this was the largest proportion of what owners reported come first. A smaller car with a worse ratio tells you more than a best-seller with a bigger number.
Per thousand complaints about that model year.
Source — NHTSA complaint file, 2,151,276 records.
How this was made. Nobody wrote this article and left it to age. It is generated by a query against the complaint database, and rebuilt every time the data is — so the numbers in the sentences above are the numbers as they stand today, not as they stood when somebody last had time to update them. How the grading works.