Safety and harm
Which Car Parts Hurt People Most Often
Not which part is complained about most — which part's failures are most likely to involve harm.
2 min read · 108 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 weeks ago
The parts complained about most are not the parts that hurt people most. Electrical faults dominate the record by volume; what follows is the record re-sorted by how often a complaint about each part also recorded a crash, a fire or an injury.
By that measure airbags comes first: 45.5% of complaints about it involved harm, against 12.8% across the file as a whole.
Parts ranked by how often failure involved harm
| Part | Complaints | Crashes | Fires | Injuries | Share involving harm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airbags | 155,744 | 40,338 | 1,077 | 29,504 | 45.5% |
| Seat Belts | 38,689 | 5,361 | 209 | 5,307 | 28.1% |
| Seats | 28,603 | 2,352 | 1,539 | 3,705 | 26.6% |
| Acceleration & Cruise Control | 84,834 | 14,318 | 2,145 | 5,568 | 26.0% |
| Brakes | 196,879 | 20,433 | 2,121 | 7,348 | 15.2% |
| Driver Assist & Collision Avoidance | 44,751 | 3,998 | 137 | 1,506 | 12.6% |
| Wheels | 24,180 | 1,791 | 207 | 826 | 11.7% |
| Body & Structure | 103,383 | 4,838 | 1,439 | 5,254 | 11.2% |
| Electrical System | 247,927 | 5,298 | 18,654 | 3,675 | 11.1% |
| Tires | 40,365 | 2,378 | 201 | 1,730 | 10.7% |
| Equipment & Accessories | 22,447 | 760 | 721 | 736 | 9.9% |
| Steering | 143,665 | 7,870 | 1,194 | 3,898 | 9.0% |
| Other & Unspecified | 115,955 | 4,322 | 2,746 | 3,065 | 8.7% |
| Stability & Traction Control | 23,940 | 1,175 | 262 | 540 | 8.3% |
| Engine & Cooling | 289,593 | 4,602 | 14,160 | 3,432 | 7.7% |
| Suspension | 89,005 | 3,808 | 393 | 1,800 | 6.7% |
| Doors, Latches & Locks | 20,553 | 377 | 108 | 809 | 6.3% |
| Fuel & Propulsion | 127,655 | 2,183 | 4,156 | 1,555 | 6.2% |
| Transmission & Drivetrain | 217,883 | 7,729 | 1,842 | 3,634 | 6.1% |
| Lights | 64,889 | 1,006 | 1,433 | 472 | 4.5% |
| Windows, Mirrors & Wipers | 76,714 | 805 | 1,002 | 1,193 | 3.9% |
Parts with at least 5,000 complaints on file.
Source — Aggregated from every published model-year-by-part record on the site.
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.