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Vehicle safety tools & calculators
Interactive tools built directly on NHTSA's public complaint, recall, and crash-test data, no account, no cost.
According to this portal's Publishing Organization, this page was last reviewed in August 2026 against our methodology. Figures and extracts on this site, including tables above 1,000 rows when the corpus is that large, are the publisher's responsibility.
Download the make-level NHTSA complaint landscape extract: nhtsa-complaint-landscape.csv (same extract as /statistics).
National picture · NHTSA ODI · 2026-08-08
This extract covers 70 makes with 2,054,142 NHTSA owner complaints and 9,941 recall campaigns; rated model-years average 4.67 NCAP stars; make-level means are 507 complaints per model and 3.6 recall campaigns per model. Tools below compare two models, score inputs against published snapshot medians, or summarize complaint-report flags.
- 70
- Makes with models
- 2,054,142
- Owner complaints (make totals)
- 4.67
- Mean NCAP overall (rated years)
- 3.6
- Mean recall campaigns per model
The safety-score calculator uses published snapshot medians, not these live means. Compare vehicles pulls live model rows from the same join.
What the lookup returns
Every model has a base registry record. Deeper fields thin from there.
All 3,445 models in the NHTSA-sourced registry carry a name, year range, and owner-complaint total. Coverage narrows from there: not every model has a logged recall campaign, a rated NCAP crash-test score, or an open NHTSA safety investigation for the tools above to surface.
- Base registry record 100% 3,445
Every model has a name, year range, and owner-complaint total the moment it enters the registry.
- Recall campaign on file 50.4% 1,736
Just over half of models have at least one NHTSA recall campaign logged against them.
- Rated NCAP crash-test score 9.5% 327
NHTSA only crash-tests a subset of model-years; most models carry no official star rating at all.
- Open or historical NHTSA investigation 6.7% 230
A formal ODI investigation is the rarest layer, reserved for models with a documented, tracked defect concern.
Share of the 3,445-model NHTSA-sourced registry carrying each field. Source: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation and NCAP.
Launchpad
Compare two vehicles
Pick any two models and see their NHTSA complaint and recall records side by side, with proportional bars.
Open tool →Safety score calculator
Enter NCAP stars, complaint count, and listed recall campaigns for a 0-100 composite against fixed fleet-median baselines (heuristic, not a live percentile).
Open tool →Complaint report context
Summarize NHTSA complaint-report flags with a 50-report floor, without treating them as a vehicle-risk score.
Open tool →Every figure on PlainCars is rendered directly from NHTSA complaint and safety data, no number is typed in by an editor. Make totals, NCAP dimension means, and per-model averages are queried live from the portal DB (70 makes, 2,054,142 complaints, 9,941 recall campaigns; vintage 2026-08-08). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of August 2026.