2020 SUBARU OUTBACK — Complaint #1808138
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about POWER TRAIN:AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION:INTERNAL:CVT filed April 19, 2022
NHTSA complaint #1808138 (ODI reference 11461397) concerns a 2020 SUBARU OUTBACK and was filed on April 19, 2022. The owner reports the failure occurred on April 17, 2022. The report was geocoded to Maryland based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as power train:automatic transmission:internal:cvt, 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 SUBARU OUTBACK cohort independently describe similar power train:automatic transmission:internal:cvt 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 2020 SUBARU OUTBACK shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
Transmission broke while vehicle was in motion. I was unable to move the vehicle any further and drifted to a complete stop in the middle of the roadway.
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 1808138 |
| ODI Number | 11461397 |
| Date Filed | April 19, 2022 |
| Failure Date | April 17, 2022 |
| VIN | 4S4BTGKDXL3 |
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.