Vehicle Recall

What It Means

A vehicle recall is triggered when a manufacturer or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) determines that a motor vehicle, replacement equipment, child safety seat, or tire creates an unreasonable risk to safety or fails to meet a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS). The manufacturer must notify every registered owner by first-class mail, repair the defect free of charge, and report completion progress to NHTSA on a quarterly basis for six calendar quarters. Under the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and the TREAD Act of 2000, manufacturers face civil penalties of up to $27,168 per violation and a maximum of $135.8 million per related series of violations for failing to report defects within five business days of discovery. Since 1966, NHTSA has overseen more than 25,000 recall campaigns covering over 500 million vehicles, tires, and pieces of equipment. Recalls can address defects ranging from faulty airbag inflators to defective fuel pumps, failing brake hoses, cracked steering components, fire-prone wiring, and software bugs in advanced driver assistance systems. The largest automotive recall in U.S. history remains the Takata airbag recall, which has affected more than 67 million inflators across 19 different automakers and has been linked to at least 27 deaths in the United States. RecallCheck indexes every active NHTSA recall campaign, keyed to specific make/model/year combinations, so owners can see the defect description, consequence, remedy, and NHTSA campaign ID on any vehicle page. A vehicle with open unrepaired recalls is a material factor in our proprietary Safety Score (0-100, A-F), with recall severity weighted at 40 percent of the overall grade.

Vehicle Recall 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