State profile
Texas vehicle complaints
69,639 NHTSA complaints filed by Texas drivers across 50 vehicle models — the models your neighbors flag most.
- Complaints
- 69,639
- Crashes
- 4,345
- Models
- 50
Texas drivers have submitted 69,639 safety complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration across 50 distinct vehicle models. Those filings include 4,345 crash reports , 1,984 fire incidents , and 268 reported fatalities — every one of those events self-reported by the vehicle owner through NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation intake form.
FORD carries the highest cumulative complaint volume in Texas with 22,589 filings, a concentration that typically reflects both registered-vehicle share and component-specific defect clusters already tracked in federal investigations. The single most-complained vehicle in Texas right now is the FORD F-150 (4,987 complaints, model years 1989–2025). Concentration is a useful first lens, but a high-volume make in one state usually signals that the brand is popular there — not necessarily more defective. The crash, fire, and fatality counters in the table below isolate the filings that rose to a serious safety event.
State-level NHTSA data is geocoded from the owner's self-reported ZIP, so climate, road salt exposure, tow-load patterns, and emissions-testing regimes in Texas all shape which defects surface here versus elsewhere. Use this page to triage which models your neighbors flag most often, then drill into each model's component breakdown and recall history on its detail page. Filings stay public for the life of the database, which means you can track a given nameplate's complaint curve against Texas's fleet turnover over time — the same dataset federal regulators rely on when they open Preliminary Evaluations.
Severe outcomes reported in Texas
Most-complained vehicles in Texas
Ranked by NHTSA complaints filed by in-state owners
- FORD F-150
FORD F-150
4,987 complaints
- FORD EXPLORER
FORD EXPLORER
3,566 complaints
- CHEVROLET SILVERADO 1500
CHEVROLET SILVERADO 1500
2,534 complaints
- JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE
JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE
2,266 complaints
- FORD FUSION
FORD FUSION
2,264 complaints
- FORD ESCAPE
FORD ESCAPE
2,236 complaints
- FORD FOCUS
FORD FOCUS
2,115 complaints
- HONDA ACCORD 1,953
HONDA ACCORD
1,953 complaints
- CHEVROLET MALIBU 1,925
CHEVROLET MALIBU
1,925 complaints
- RAM 1500 1,786
RAM 1500
1,786 complaints
What this shows The FORD F-150 draws the most NHTSA complaints from Texas drivers. State-level volume reflects how common a model is locally as much as its defect rate.
Full ranking: top 50 most-complained vehicles in Texas
Most-Complained Texas Vehicles
Sources: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) complaints database, with fatality-linked filings cross-checked against NHTSA FARS and crash-test ratings drawn from NHTSA NCAP. State is self-reported by the vehicle owner.
How Texas compares to the national picture
State-level complaint counts in the NHTSA database are heavily shaped by population, registered-vehicle density, and reporting culture. Larger states like California, Texas, and Florida sit at the top of the ranked list almost regardless of model mix, because the absolute number of vehicles on the road there dwarfs smaller jurisdictions. To use Texas's totals fairly, consider the per-capita complaint rate against the U.S. average — and check whether a specific model's share of Texas complaints is significantly higher than that model's national share. When the local share is disproportionate, that's a stronger signal of a regional defect pattern (weather-related corrosion, fuel-formulation interactions, terrain-related wear) than a generic country-wide design flaw.
Other PlainCars data for Texas
Beyond this state-level vehicle complaint roll-up, PlainCars surfaces national-level views you can use to triangulate a model that caught your eye:
- Most-complained models nationally
- Most-recalled models nationally
- Safest models by NHTSA NCAP
- National repair-cost CPI trends
- Browse all car models alphabetically
A note on self-reported state data
The state field on each NHTSA complaint is supplied by the consumer at the time of filing — there is no mandatory validation that the owner is filing from their state of registration, nor that the incident occurred in that state. In practice this means a complaint filed by a Texas resident about a vehicle they purchased in a neighboring state is still tagged to Texas; conversely, an out-of-state visitor whose vehicle developed an issue while driving through Texas but who filed from their home state will not appear in this view. NHTSA does not deduplicate by VIN across years, so multi-year complaints from the same vehicle accumulate in the totals. When using this page as a starting point for buying-decision research, treat Texas's ranking as directional, not absolute, and pair it with the model-level rankings linked above.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many vehicle complaints have been filed in Texas?
What are the most complained-about vehicles in Texas?
Where does the state vehicle complaint data come from?
Can I file a vehicle complaint for my state?
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.