2021 TOYOTA RAV4 — Complaint #2120195
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about SEATS filed August 13, 2025
NHTSA complaint #2120195 (ODI reference 11680407) concerns a 2021 TOYOTA RAV4 and was filed on August 13, 2025. The owner reports the failure occurred on August 11, 2025. The report was geocoded to Georgia based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as seats, 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 cohort independently describe similar seats 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 shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
The seat stops moving forward and back on one side. This issue is caused by a gear that is prone to breaking in models 2019-2024 on the RAV4. As a result, you can't move your seat forward or backward, and it could get stuck. This is a risk because people need to be able to adjust the car seat to fit inside the car properly. If the seat becomes stuck or wedged in the wrong position, it could cause the airbags to deploy incorrectly for the person sitting in the seat. This issue can affect drivers. There is an entire Reddit thread dedicated to it, and even a third-party seller of replacement gears, because Toyota's repair cost exceeds $2000, as you have to buy an entire new rail system instead of a single gear. I took it to the dealership and got a quote for the repair. There was no error message, and it just stopped one day after my wife moved the seat up; it would no longer go back. I'm not sure what caused this, but it seems like a significant issue that the driver's side seat can't be
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 2120195 |
| ODI Number | 11680407 |
| Date Filed | August 13, 2025 |
| Failure Date | August 11, 2025 |
| VIN | 2T3W1RFV3MC |
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Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
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