2023 Vehicle Safety Complaints

The 2023 model year cohort has accumulated 27,666 NHTSA consumer safety complaints across 434 nameplates from 50 manufacturers — a cross-section of everything the Office of Defects Investigation has filed for vehicles whose model year stamp reads 2023. Severity indicators inside this cohort include 1,999 crash reports, 206 fire incidents, and 24 reported fatalities, all owner-submitted through NHTSA's public complaint portal.

Inside the 2023 cohort, the FISKER OCEAN leads the complaint count with 1,833 filings, followed by the TESLA MODEL Y and the HONDA HR-V. On the component side, the most frequently cited category for the 2023 year class is electrical system (3,866 complaints), ahead of unknown or other and engine. 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 2023 cohort. Drill into any model in the table below to see its component-level breakdown, safety rating, and recall history — and compare against the 2022 and 2024 cohorts to spot year-over-year discontinuities that point to real defect patterns rather than statistical noise.