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 hours ago

2,136,009 of complaints carry the state the owner filed from. California leads with 245,346 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 245,346 11.5%

Texas 155,411 7.3%

Florida 153,914 7.2%

New York 120,181 5.6%

Pennsylvania 94,781 4.4%

Ohio 91,418 4.3%

Michigan 83,694 3.9%

Illinois 77,891 3.6%

Georgia 75,324 3.5%

Virginia 72,107 3.4%

New Jersey 68,632 3.2%

North Carolina 67,881 3.2%

Maryland 57,821 2.7%

Massachusetts 52,994 2.5%

Tennessee 42,758 2.0%

Arizona 42,708 2.0%

Washington 41,659 2.0%

Missouri 40,738 1.9%

Indiana 40,513 1.9%

Wisconsin 38,493 1.8%

Colorado 33,299 1.6%

South Carolina 32,746 1.5%

Alabama 31,276 1.5%

Minnesota 31,259 1.5%

Kentucky 28,743 1.3%

Connecticut 28,617 1.3%

Louisiana 27,430 1.3%

Oklahoma 21,273 1.0%

Oregon 20,973 1.0%

Arkansas 17,106 0.8%

Nevada 17,080 0.8%

Kansas 16,393 0.8%

Mississippi 16,002 0.7%

Iowa 15,546 0.7%

West Virginia 14,362 0.7%

Utah 13,724 0.6%

New Hampshire 12,376 0.6%

New Mexico 11,367 0.5%

Maine 10,774 0.5%

Nebraska 9,149 0.4%

Delaware 8,174 0.4%

Idaho 8,083 0.4%

Rhode Island 7,200 0.3%

District of Columbia 7,020 0.3%

Hawaii 6,920 0.3%

Vermont 5,523 0.3%

Montana 5,493 0.3%

Puerto Rico 5,329 0.2%

Alaska 4,717 0.2%

South Dakota 3,791 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.