Injury Report

What It Means

Injury-flagged complaints are NHTSA complaints where the structured "Injured" field is non-zero, indicating the complainant reported that the defect caused bodily harm to the driver, passengers, or others. Injury-flagged reports are the strongest single signal in the complaint database, because injuries demonstrate that the defect has produced tangible human harm rather than near-misses or property damage only. In a typical year, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 complaints in the NHTSA database include injury reports, and the counts are broken down further when a fatality is involved (see Fatality Report). Under the TREAD Act of 2000, manufacturers are also required to separately report injuries and deaths to NHTSA through the Early Warning Reporting (EWR) system on a quarterly basis, which is a parallel and complementary dataset to consumer-filed complaints. The Takata airbag inflator defect has been linked to at least 27 U.S. deaths and more than 400 injuries, all of which appear in both the consumer complaint database and the EWR data. The Toyota unintended acceleration investigation was driven largely by clusters of injury-flagged and fatality-flagged complaints between 2004 and 2009. RecallCheck surfaces injury-flagged complaint counts on every vehicle page and treats injury reports as a high-weight component of the Crash/Fire Reports factor (20 percent of Safety Score). When evaluating a used vehicle, a pattern of injury-flagged complaints for a specific component, particularly airbags, seat belts, brakes, steering, or fuel system, is a much stronger buyer-beware signal than raw complaint volume, because it indicates that the defect has a track record of actually hurting people rather than simply failing inconveniently.

Frequently Asked Questions