2016 Vehicle Safety Complaints

The 2016 model year cohort has accumulated 66,886 NHTSA consumer safety complaints across 493 nameplates from 45 manufacturers — a cross-section of everything the Office of Defects Investigation has filed for vehicles whose model year stamp reads 2016. Severity indicators inside this cohort include 3,460 crash reports, 1,177 fire incidents, and 164 reported fatalities, all owner-submitted through NHTSA's public complaint portal.

Inside the 2016 cohort, the FORD EXPLORER leads the complaint count with 2,924 filings, followed by the FORD F-150 and the HONDA PILOT. On the component side, the most frequently cited category for the 2016 year class is engine (11,569 complaints), ahead of power train and electrical system. 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 2016 cohort. Drill into any model in the table below to see its component-level breakdown, safety rating, and recall history — and compare against the 2015 and 2017 cohorts to spot year-over-year discontinuities that point to real defect patterns rather than statistical noise.