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 · 129 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 hours 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 12.9% across the file as a whole.
Parts ranked by how often failure involved harm
| Part | Complaints | Crashes | Fires | Injuries | Share involving harm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airbags | 155,546 | 40,276 | 1,075 | 29,459 | 45.5% |
| Seat Belts | 38,602 | 5,353 | 208 | 5,297 | 28.1% |
| Seats | 28,521 | 2,352 | 1,539 | 3,701 | 26.6% |
| Acceleration & Cruise Control | 84,656 | 14,293 | 2,144 | 5,560 | 26.0% |
| Brakes | 196,407 | 20,385 | 2,114 | 7,327 | 15.2% |
| Driver Assist & Collision Avoidance | 43,924 | 3,906 | 132 | 1,468 | 12.5% |
| Wheels | 24,127 | 1,788 | 207 | 823 | 11.7% |
| Body & Structure | 103,108 | 4,827 | 1,434 | 5,241 | 11.2% |
| Electrical System | 246,872 | 5,261 | 18,622 | 3,651 | 11.2% |
| Tires | 40,309 | 2,378 | 201 | 1,730 | 10.7% |
| Equipment & Accessories | 22,421 | 760 | 719 | 734 | 9.9% |
| Steering | 143,306 | 7,845 | 1,193 | 3,883 | 9.0% |
| Other & Unspecified | 115,162 | 4,293 | 2,725 | 3,034 | 8.7% |
| Stability & Traction Control | 23,937 | 1,175 | 262 | 540 | 8.3% |
| Engine & Cooling | 288,020 | 4,591 | 14,121 | 3,429 | 7.7% |
| Suspension | 88,852 | 3,802 | 393 | 1,798 | 6.7% |
| Doors, Latches & Locks | 20,516 | 377 | 108 | 808 | 6.3% |
| Fuel & Propulsion | 127,175 | 2,178 | 4,141 | 1,554 | 6.2% |
| Transmission & Drivetrain | 216,960 | 7,707 | 1,839 | 3,624 | 6.1% |
| Lights | 64,754 | 1,002 | 1,431 | 471 | 4.5% |
| Windows, Mirrors & Wipers | 76,576 | 804 | 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.