Buying used
What to Check Before You Buy, Based on What Actually Fails
The parts that break most often across the whole record, and the mileage each tends to break at.
2 min read · 55 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 weeks ago
A used-car checklist is usually a list of what is easy to inspect. This is a list of what actually fails, taken from every complaint in the federal record, with the mileage each part tends to fail at.
What breaks, and roughly when
| Part | Complaints | Typical failure mileage | Share involving harm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engine & Cooling | 276,207 | 63,957 mi | 7.4% |
| Electrical System | 233,774 | 60,544 mi | 10.4% |
| Transmission & Drivetrain | 205,546 | 56,280 mi | 5.9% |
| Brakes | 179,821 | 52,247 mi | 14.9% |
| Airbags | 148,289 | 68,725 mi | 43.4% |
| Steering | 135,320 | 62,372 mi | 8.6% |
| Fuel & Propulsion | 117,619 | 64,727 mi | 5.7% |
| Other & Unspecified | 96,095 | 62,917 mi | 8.7% |
| Body & Structure | 93,688 | 57,554 mi | 11.2% |
| Suspension | 80,591 | 60,489 mi | 6.6% |
| Acceleration & Cruise Control | 76,760 | 54,198 mi | 25.7% |
| Windows, Mirrors & Wipers | 67,631 | 50,552 mi | 3.7% |
| Lights | 58,558 | 61,079 mi | 4.4% |
| Driver Assist & Collision Avoidance | 36,942 | 40,334 mi | 11.4% |
| Tires | 32,814 | 48,195 mi | 10.6% |
| Seat Belts | 28,454 | 67,470 mi | 28.6% |
| Stability & Traction Control | 23,594 | 69,201 mi | 8.2% |
| Seats | 22,381 | 58,917 mi | 24.7% |
Parts with at least 20,000 complaints and a recorded failure mileage.
How to use it
Open the report for the exact year you are being offered — not the model, the year. It lists the parts owners of that year complained about most, the named sub-assembly where the record has one, and the mileage the failures clustered around. If the car in front of you is close to that mileage on a part high in its list, that is the thing to have looked at.
Source — Mileage figures are medians of owner-supplied odometer readings.
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.