2021 Vehicle Safety Complaints

The 2021 model year cohort has accumulated 33,804 NHTSA consumer safety complaints across 410 nameplates from 44 manufacturers — a cross-section of everything the Office of Defects Investigation has filed for vehicles whose model year stamp reads 2021. Severity indicators inside this cohort include 1,901 crash reports, 434 fire incidents, and 32 reported fatalities, all owner-submitted through NHTSA's public complaint portal.

Inside the 2021 cohort, the TESLA MODEL Y leads the complaint count with 1,870 filings, followed by the JEEP WRANGLER and the TESLA MODEL 3. On the component side, the most frequently cited category for the 2021 year class is engine (4,457 complaints), ahead of electrical system and unknown or other. 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 2021 cohort. Drill into any model in the table below to see its component-level breakdown, safety rating, and recall history — and compare against the 2020 and 2022 cohorts to spot year-over-year discontinuities that point to real defect patterns rather than statistical noise.