2002 Vehicle Safety Complaints

The 2002 model year cohort has accumulated 72,172 NHTSA consumer safety complaints across 632 nameplates from 49 manufacturers — a cross-section of everything the Office of Defects Investigation has filed for vehicles whose model year stamp reads 2002. Severity indicators inside this cohort include 5,658 crash reports, 2,238 fire incidents, and 307 reported fatalities, all owner-submitted through NHTSA's public complaint portal.

Inside the 2002 cohort, the FORD EXPLORER leads the complaint count with 4,096 filings, followed by the JEEP LIBERTY and the FORD WINDSTAR. On the component side, the most frequently cited category for the 2002 year class is power train:automatic transmission (4,512 complaints), ahead of electrical system and air bags. Comparing a single model year against adjacent years is one of the cleanest ways to detect platform-level supplier changes: a sharp year-over-year jump in a specific component, concentrated on a handful of nameplates sharing an architecture, is the classic early-warning signature that regulators and insurance actuaries flag.

Remember that complaint volume is not a reliability ranking. Newer model years have spent less time on the road and therefore accumulate fewer filings, while older model years may be artificially quiet because few examples are still registered. NHTSA's Early Warning Reporting system weights complaints per registered vehicle, not just raw counts, when deciding whether to open a Preliminary Evaluation on a 2002 cohort. Drill into any model in the table below to see its component-level breakdown, safety rating, and recall history — and compare against the 2001 and 2003 cohorts to spot year-over-year discontinuities that point to real defect patterns rather than statistical noise.