Total Complaints
1 filings
Isuzu Impulse · model year
1 NHTSA complaints. A VIN lookup is required to determine whether a specific vehicle has an unrepaired recall.
NHTSA overall rating
Not crash-tested
New Car Assessment Program
The verdict
The 1989 Isuzu Impulse posts top-quartile complaint standing among its own model-year siblings.
The 1989IsuzuImpulse carries 1 consumer safety complaint in NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation database for this specific model-year cohort. Within that volume, owners reported 0 crashes, 0 fires, 0 injuries, and 0 fatalities. No NCAP 5-star crash-test rating is available for this model year in the federal database.
The most frequently selected component label in reports for the 1989 Impulse is electrical system:ignition:module with 1 filings. Complaint categories reflect owner reports and intake categorization; they do not establish a defect pattern or cause.
NHTSA currently has 5 investigation files overlapping the 1989 Impulse. Owners comparing this cohort against neighboring years should read the complaint-by-year trend as report volume, not a causal diagnosis. Use the related-complaint feed and the official recall lookup when researching a specific vehicle.
PlainCars' own composite of NHTSA NCAP crash-test ratings and rollover-risk assessment, each dimension normalized against the federal scale or the full national model-year corpus. Not an official NHTSA figure, and not a substitute for a specific vehicle's VIN-level recall check.
Total Complaints
1 filings
Crashes Reported
0 reports
Source
NHTSA ODI
Federal complaints database
At or below the fleet median complaint volume.
| Component | Count |
|---|---|
| ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:IGNITION:MODULE | 1 |
INSULATIVE SPRAY ON ECU BOARD CAUSES ELECTRICAL SHORTS IN HOT WEATHER. THIS LEADS TO IDLE SPEEDS FROM 400RPM TO 2000RPM. MAJOR CONCERN IS RANDOM STALLING. UNABLE TO START CAR AFTER STALLING. KNOWN TO HAPPEN WHILE DRIVING, WHICH CAN BE QUITE A HAZARD AS THE CAR IS STRANDED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD. NOT SAFE. THIS IS A KNOWN PROBLEM. - HTTP://WWW.ISUZUPERFORMANCE.COM/ISUZUWEB/RECALL.HTML. *AK
Data vintage: August 2026. 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.
Every figure on PlainCars is rendered directly from NHTSA complaint and safety data, no number is typed in by an editor. This year-specific record is rendered from NHTSA ODI, recall, and NCAP rows for the 1989 Isuzu Impulse; no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of August 2026.
Read our methodology - how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.