Trends and geography

Which States File the Most Car Complaints

Where the complaints come from — and why the answer is mostly about population, except where it is not.

2 min read · 54 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 weeks ago

2,143,910 of complaints carry the state the owner filed from. California leads with 246,164 complaints — 11.5% of every complaint with a state on it.

Mostly this is a population map with extra steps. What makes it worth reading is the mix rather than the totals: a part that fails in heat, in road salt or at altitude shows up in some states long before others, and the per-model state pages on this site break that down.

Complaints by state

California 246,164 11.5%

Texas 156,235 7.3%

Florida 154,544 7.2%

New York 120,539 5.6%

Pennsylvania 95,082 4.4%

Ohio 91,687 4.3%

Michigan 83,968 3.9%

Illinois 78,171 3.6%

Georgia 75,622 3.5%

Virginia 72,354 3.4%

New Jersey 68,877 3.2%

North Carolina 68,149 3.2%

Maryland 57,995 2.7%

Massachusetts 53,168 2.5%

Arizona 42,942 2.0%

Tennessee 42,935 2.0%

Washington 41,812 2.0%

Missouri 40,844 1.9%

Indiana 40,648 1.9%

Wisconsin 38,624 1.8%

Colorado 33,459 1.6%

South Carolina 32,923 1.5%

Alabama 31,403 1.5%

Minnesota 31,360 1.5%

Kentucky 28,834 1.3%

Connecticut 28,703 1.3%

Louisiana 27,529 1.3%

Oklahoma 21,367 1.0%

Oregon 21,027 1.0%

Arkansas 17,168 0.8%

Nevada 17,163 0.8%

Kansas 16,464 0.8%

Mississippi 16,057 0.7%

Iowa 15,607 0.7%

West Virginia 14,421 0.7%

Utah 13,813 0.6%

New Hampshire 12,397 0.6%

New Mexico 11,414 0.5%

Maine 10,807 0.5%

Nebraska 9,199 0.4%

Delaware 8,222 0.4%

Idaho 8,127 0.4%

Rhode Island 7,215 0.3%

District of Columbia 7,031 0.3%

Hawaii 6,932 0.3%

Vermont 5,527 0.3%

Montana 5,512 0.3%

Puerto Rico 5,334 0.2%

Alaska 4,732 0.2%

South Dakota 3,803 0.2%

Source — State as recorded on the complaint by the person who filed it.

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.