Recall Register

Methodology

Every figure on this site is computed from the agency files listed on the data sources page and rebuilt daily; the current build uses data through 24 Sep 2026. This page explains each measure and the choices behind it.

Vehicles: make, model and model year

NHTSA's recall file lists each campaign once per make, model and model year it covers; the complaint file records the same three fields on each complaint. The site joins the two on those fields after normalising case and punctuation, so "ACCORD" and "Accord" meet but "Accord" and "Accord Hybrid" stay separate, as NHTSA keeps them. Rows with model year 9999 (unknown or not applicable) are excluded from vehicle pages. A vehicle page is built when the model year has at least two recall campaigns or 25 complaints; every model year still appears in its line's table.

Counting complaints

A complaint that names two components appears twice in NHTSA's file. The site counts complaints as unique complaint numbers per vehicle and component mentions as rows. Crash, fire, injury and death figures are the complainant's own entries and are counted once per complaint. Complaint narratives are never read into the site.

Per 1,000 component mentions

For a vehicle, a component's mentions divided by all component mentions for that model year, times 1,000. The same rate is computed for the model line (all years) and for every vehicle of that model year in the file, so a component can be read against two references. The rate normalises for how many complaints a vehicle attracts; it does not normalise for sales volume, which NHTSA's files do not carry.

Component groups

NHTSA describes components in a colon-separated hierarchy ("FUEL SYSTEM, GASOLINE:DELIVERY:FUEL PUMP"). Component pages use the first level; the sub-component table shows the most common full descriptions. Recalls are attached to a component group when any component on the campaign belongs to it.

Why makes are not compared

Complaint counts rise with the number of vehicles on the road and with press attention; NHTSA's files do not carry sales. Rankings are therefore shown only within a make (its model lines by complaints and by complaints per model year) and within a model line (its model years against the line's average). No page ranks makes or models against each other, and no page assigns a rating.

Consumer products (CPSC)

The CPSC API answers date-range queries; the site pulls the register in yearly ranges and keeps each range as a snapshot so a slow or failing API does not empty the site. The brand is the first manufacturer, importer or distributor CPSC lists (corporate suffixes and addresses removed), or the firm named before "Recalls" in the title. Category is CPSC's product type for the first product. Hazard classes are CPSC's hazard type where the record carries one; older records do not, and are tagged with the hazard words in CPSC's own hazard statement ("poses a fire hazard" gives Fire). Units are parsed from CPSC's "About 43,000" text. A product page is marked noindex when it is the firm's only recall and is more than ten years old.

Food, drugs and devices (openFDA)

openFDA publishes one record per product in a recall; the site groups records by FDA's event number. An event's class is the most severe class among its records, its status is "Ongoing" if any record is, and its dates are the earliest initiation and report dates. Firm pages group events by the recalling-firm name exactly as FDA spells it, so one company can appear under several spellings. Records before 2012 are sparse in openFDA and yearly counts for those years are incomplete.

Months

NHTSA campaigns are assigned by the date the Part 573 report was received, CPSC recalls by announcement date and FDA events by the earliest report date among their records. The current month is always partial.

People

Firm names that read as a person (a sole proprietor, a physician's practice, a family trust) are withheld wherever they occur and never become an entity page. The filter is conservative and errs toward withholding; a report of a person's name anywhere on the site is acted on at the next build.

Thresholds and indexing

Vehicle pages need two recall campaigns or 25 complaints (model years below that are listed on the model page with their counts and a link to NHTSA); FDA event pages need two product records or a recalling firm with a firm page (other events are listed on month and firm tables); brand and firm pages need three recalls or events; hazard and category pages need five recalls; component pages need 100 complaint mentions. Makes with fewer than two campaigns and 25 complaints, single-recall products over ten years old, single-record FDA events over ten years old from firms with no other event, and months with fewer than three records are built but marked noindex.

Why counts can differ from the agency sites

Words the site never uses in its own copy include those that assign blame or a rating; where such a word appears it is inside an agency's quoted text.