NHTSA complaint #1527995 (ODI reference 11164637) concerns a 2011 MERCEDES-BENZ GLK350 and was filed on January 2, 2019. The owner reports the failure occurred on December 24, 2018. The report was geocoded to Maryland based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as air bags:side/window:curtain, one of NHTSA's standardized taxonomy codes used to group defect patterns across make, model, and year.

The filer flagged the following severity indicators: crash: yes, fire: no, injuries: 1, fatalities: 0. A complaint that flags a crash, fire, or fatality is escalated on NHTSA's internal review queue and factors more heavily into any Preliminary Evaluation decision on this make and model. Because a VIN was supplied, this complaint is tied to a specific vehicle and not just a model-year cohort.

Individual complaints are consumer-submitted and unverified by NHTSA engineers — the agency's role at this stage is to collect, index, and make them searchable. What matters for federal action is the pattern: when many owners of the same MERCEDES-BENZ GLK350 cohort independently describe similar air bags:side/window:curtain failures, defect investigators have grounds to open a PE and request manufacturer data. Related filings for the same vehicle and component appear below, and the detail page for the full 2011 MERCEDES-BENZ GLK350 shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.