Complaint Rate

What It Means

Complaint Rate is the second-largest factor in the RecallCheck Safety Score, contributing 30 percent of the total. It is calculated as the count of consumer complaints filed with NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) for a specific make/model/year, normalized by the estimated number of registered units of that vehicle still on the road. Normalization is critical because raw complaint counts are strongly correlated with sales volume: the Ford F-150 consistently leads the complaint database in absolute terms simply because it is the best-selling vehicle in the United States, with over 700,000 units sold annually. Without normalization, every popular vehicle would score poorly and every low-volume vehicle would score well, regardless of actual reliability. RecallCheck normalizes complaint counts against registered-population estimates derived from IHS Markit/S&P Global Mobility registration data, producing a complaints-per-10,000-registered-units metric that is comparable across vehicles of vastly different sales volumes. The typical U.S. vehicle accumulates 5 to 25 complaints per 10,000 registered units over its first 10 years of life. Vehicles scoring poorly in Complaint Rate typically have rates above 50 per 10,000, with the worst offenders (Jeep Compass 2007-2010, certain Chrysler minivan years, multiple Hyundai/Kia years during the engine-fire era) exceeding 150 per 10,000. Crash-flagged, Fire-flagged, Injury-flagged, and Fatality-flagged complaints are not directly counted in the Complaint Rate factor (those feed the separate Crash/Fire Reports factor at 20 percent), but their underlying records do contribute to the total complaint count used in rate normalization. Complaint Rate is an especially leading indicator, because complaints accumulate faster than recalls, NHTSA typically receives thousands of complaints about a defect for every one that ultimately produces a recall.

Complaint Rate 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