2021 TOYOTA RAV4 PRIME — Complaint #1794322
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about SEAT BELTS:STATUS INDICATOR SWITCH filed February 12, 2022
NHTSA complaint #1794322 (ODI reference 11451668) concerns a 2021 TOYOTA RAV4 PRIME and was filed on February 12, 2022. The owner reports the failure occurred on February 9, 2022. The report was geocoded to Colorado based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as seat belts:status indicator switch, 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: no, fire: no, injuries: 0, fatalities: 0. No crash, fire, or fatality was associated with this report, which places it in the early-warning stream rather than the priority-review stream. 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 TOYOTA RAV4 PRIME cohort independently describe similar seat belts:status indicator switch 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 2021 TOYOTA RAV4 PRIME shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
The car had a front passenger and two rear seat passengers, one right and one left. In the middle rear seat there was a tray of cupcakes weighing ~2lbs. As we were driving at night in a complex area of freeway onramps and offramps an alarm started to deploy, beaping steadily. I glanced down at the multi-info-display (MID) and couldn't tell what the alarm was, and I was driving at around 55-60mph, at night. Over the next 45 seconds or so the alarm increased in frequency to the point of starting to sound outright urgent. I finally saw noticed three tiny icons in the lower right part of the MID, amidst an array of other lit icons and indicators, representing the 3 rear seats, and the center one was not illuminated. The car's sensing system apparently determined the seat was occupied but the occupant not belted in. I told everyone to check seatbelts. By now everyone in the car was in a state of near panic as all belts were secured. At the last few seconds, distracted by the urgen
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 1794322 |
| ODI Number | 11451668 |
| Date Filed | February 12, 2022 |
| Failure Date | February 9, 2022 |
| VIN | JTMEB3FV6MD |
Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.