Civil Penalty

What It Means

The maximum NHTSA civil penalty per individual violation is approximately $27,168, and the maximum per related series of violations is approximately $135.8 million, both as of the 2025 inflation adjustment under 49 U.S.C. 30165. A "violation" can mean a single defective vehicle, a single day of late reporting, or a single misstatement in an Early Warning Report — penalties scale with the number of vehicles and the number of days in non-compliance, which is why aggregate penalties in major cases reach the nine-figure cap. Civil penalties are monetary fines NHTSA can assess against manufacturers, importers, dealers, equipment makers, and replacement parts suppliers for violations of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Common violations that trigger civil penalties include: failing to file a Part 573 defect report within the statutory five business days of discovery; submitting incomplete or inaccurate Early Warning Reporting (EWR) quarterly data; failing to notify owners within the 60-day statutory window after a recall is filed; selling new vehicles with known open recalls; and producing vehicles that fail to meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). The penalty caps are inflation-adjusted annually under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015, which is why the per-violation cap rises by a few hundred dollars each year (it was $24,000 in 2019, $27,168 in 2025). Landmark civil penalties include Hyundai-Kia (2020) combined $210 million for delayed engine-fire recall reporting (the largest aggregate NHTSA civil penalty in history); Fiat Chrysler (2015) $105 million for systemic recall mishandling across 23 campaigns; Takata (2015) $200 million in civil penalties for the airbag inflator cover-up; Honda (2015) $70 million for under-reporting EWR death and injury claims; and General Motors (2014) $35 million for delayed ignition switch reporting. Civil penalties are distinct from criminal fines imposed by the Department of Justice under the TREAD Act's criminal provisions, though the two often accompany each other in major cases (the GM case ultimately produced both a $35 million NHTSA civil penalty and a separate $900 million DOJ deferred prosecution agreement; the Toyota unintended acceleration case produced $66 million across four NHTSA consent orders plus a $1.2 billion DOJ criminal fine in 2014). The TREAD Act also added criminal penalties of up to 15 years imprisonment for individuals who knowingly conceal safety defects that result in death or serious injury, a provision invoked in the Takata airbag prosecution. RecallCheck does not currently display civil penalties per recall campaign, but the civil penalty history of each major manufacturer provides context for how aggressively that manufacturer has historically managed safety issues — manufacturers under active consent orders have measurably higher recall completion rates and shorter average defect-to-recall timelines in the years following a major penalty.

Civil Penalty is one of the NHTSA or vehicle-safety concepts that recurs across RecallIndex. The definition above is the technical answer; below is how the concept connects to the NHTSA data that drives every vehicle page on the site.

In the RecallIndex Safety Score, this concept feeds one of the four factor weights — recall severity (40 percent), complaint frequency (30 percent), crash and fire reports (20 percent), or trend direction (10 percent). The methodology page on the site walks through every input in detail.

Frequently Asked Questions