Total Complaints
1 filings
AUDI R8 · model year
1 NHTSA complaints, 1 crash report for this specific cohort.
NHTSA overall rating
Not crash-tested
New Car Assessment Program
The 2018AUDIR8 carries 1 consumer safety complaint in NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation database for this specific model-year cohort. Within that volume, owners reported 1 crash, 0 fires, 1 injury, and 1 fatality. For crash performance, NHTSA's New Car Assessment Program gave this cohort an overall Not Rated/5 rating, with Not Rated/5 front crash, Not Rated/5 side crash, and Not Rated/5 rollover scores derived from standardized barrier and dynamic tests.
Component-level analysis is where model-year complaints become actionable: the top complaint category for the 2018 R8 is air bags with 1 filings. Concentration in one or two component groups is the classic signature of a systemic defect; a flat distribution usually reflects normal aging, warranty complaints, or isolated build-plant variability.
NHTSA currently has 9 investigation files overlapping the 2018 R8. Owners comparing this cohort against neighboring years should pair the counters above with the complaint-by-year trend on the parent model page — a spike in a single year often tracks to a platform refresh, a new transmission supplier, or an updated ECU calibration. Use the related-complaint feed below to read raw owner narratives before deciding whether any pattern here affects your specific use case.
Total Complaints
1 filings
Crashes Reported
1 reports
Source
NHTSA ODI
Federal complaints database
At or below the fleet median complaint volume.
| Component | Count |
|---|---|
| AIR BAGS | 1 |
The car was involved in a fatal crash where the side impact airbag (side of fatality) failed to deploy and the EDR failed to fully comply with Part 563 requirements. All other airbags and rollover system deployed but the EDR recorded only the deployment of the side impact airbag on the driver side. The EDR included 6 events and some of them have severity less than the threshold required by the regulation. There was a criminal investigation and trial as a result of the fatality and the state witnesses explained this failure due to the fact the airbag deployed so fast so the EDR could not record it. I believe the EDR failed to record the crash event correctly and also failed to deploy the side impact airbag on the passenger side, This is evident from the fact that there are 4 other airbags and a rollover protection system that were deployed and the EDR, contrary to Part 563, failed to record them.
Data as of 2025. Sources: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) complaints database, NHTSA recall campaign API, NHTSA NCAP crash-test ratings, and NHTSA FARS for fatality cross-reference.
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.