2021 TOYOTA HIGHLANDER — Complaint #2176151
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about POWER TRAIN filed February 12, 2026
NHTSA complaint #2176151 (ODI reference 11717532) concerns a 2021 TOYOTA HIGHLANDER and was filed on February 12, 2026. The owner reports the failure occurred on February 1, 2026. The report was geocoded to Ohio based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as power train, 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 HIGHLANDER cohort independently describe similar power train 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 HIGHLANDER shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
Known transmission failure.whining noise when accelerating. T-SB-0008-21
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 2176151 |
| ODI Number | 11717532 |
| Date Filed | February 12, 2026 |
| Failure Date | February 1, 2026 |
| VIN | 5TDHZRBH3MS |
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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.