US Vehicle Reliability Scorecard — NHTSA Owner Complaints and Recalls, MY 2005–2025

One row per vehicle (year + make + model) with its ProblemsByVin reliability score, total NHTSA complaints, recalls, and defect investigations, plus the single component owners complain about most. The master index across the whole tracked fleet — the flat table to join every other dataset to. Contents: 5,581 vehicles. Method: The reliability score is a TRANSPARENT heuristic on a 1.0 (worst) – 5.0 (best) scale (the site shows it ×2, out of 10). It starts at 5.0 and subtracts log10(complaints + 1) × 0.55, 0.30 per critical recall, and 0.10 per severe recall. It is a complaint-and-recall-VOLUME signal, NOT a per-capita failure rate: we do not yet have sales/registration denominators, so higher-volume models can score lower simply because more of them are on the road. "top_component" is the component category with the most complaints for that vehicle. Alleged death/fire counts are sums of unverified consumer allegations across the vehicle's complaints. Motorcycles are excluded (this site is cars-only). NHTSA complaints are unverified consumer reports. Source: U.S. NHTSA owner complaints and recalls (public record), model years 2005–2025. Canonical version and full methodology: https://problemsbyvin.com/data/ . Released under CC BY 4.0 — attribution to ProblemsByVin (https://problemsbyvin.com).