Buying used

Used Cars to Avoid, According to the Federal Record

Not an opinion piece. The model years that drew the most complaints relative to the rest of their own model, with what went wrong on each.

3 min read · 167 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 hours ago

Every list of used cars to avoid you have read was somebody's opinion, or a rewrite of somebody else's. This one is arithmetic: these are the model years whose complaint record stands out worst against the other years of the same car.

That comparison matters more than it sounds. A model can run for twenty years and be perfectly sound for eighteen of them — a gearbox supplier changes, a wiring loom is redesigned, and one or two years turn into the ones to walk away from. Those years are what this finds.

The years to walk away from

And what to buy instead

Every model above has better years. The model page for each car ranks its whole run, so the useful move is to open the one you are considering and look at the year either side of the one you were offered.

Source — NHTSA complaint file. Grades explained on the methodology page.