2022 Vehicle Safety Complaints

The 2022 model year cohort has accumulated 31,757 NHTSA consumer safety complaints across 428 nameplates from 47 manufacturers — a cross-section of everything the Office of Defects Investigation has filed for vehicles whose model year stamp reads 2022. Severity indicators inside this cohort include 1,760 crash reports, 384 fire incidents, and 321 reported fatalities, all owner-submitted through NHTSA's public complaint portal.

Inside the 2022 cohort, the TESLA MODEL Y leads the complaint count with 1,474 filings, followed by the TESLA MODEL 3 and the HONDA CIVIC. On the component side, the most frequently cited category for the 2022 year class is electrical system (4,241 complaints), ahead of engine 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 2022 cohort. Drill into any model in the table below to see its component-level breakdown, safety rating, and recall history — and compare against the 2021 and 2023 cohorts to spot year-over-year discontinuities that point to real defect patterns rather than statistical noise.