The most complained-about used cars in America

We aggregated owner complaints and recall campaigns recorded by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a free public-domain government dataset, across 496 used-car models in the CarWizz database. Complaints are summed across every model year on record for each model (model years 1996 to 2025). The totals reflect 638,878 complaints and 9,566recall campaigns in all. The “owners report” line for each car comes from CarWizz owner reports, which summarize what owners themselves say, not the raw complaint category.

The important caveat: raw complaint totals track how many cars were sold and how long a model has been on the road. A best-seller in production for 25 years will collect more complaints than a niche model sold for three years, even if it is more reliable per vehicle. This study ranks total complaint volume, not complaints per car sold. It is a map of where owner-reported problems are concentrated, not a verdict on which car is least reliable.

That is why the most useful column for a buyer is the worst model year: complaints are rarely spread evenly, so avoiding one bad year often matters more than avoiding the whole model. Each worst-year link breaks the complaints and recalls down for that specific year.