CarWizz data study
Complaints do not spread evenly across a car's life: they pile onto specific years. We ranked every individual model year across 496 used-car models by owner complaints filed with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These are the 20 single years with the most.
Published July 2026. Source: NHTSA (US public record).
Key findings
NHTSA owner complaints for one specific model year. Every row links to that exact year's full complaint and recall breakdown.
We ranked every individual (model, model year) combination recorded by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a free public-domain government dataset, across 496 used-car models and 638,878 total complaints (model years 1996 to 2026). Unlike whole-model complaint totals, a single-year ranking is not inflated by how long a model has been in production, which makes it a fairer signal of a genuinely troubled year.
The important caveat: complaint counts still track sales volume. A best-selling year accumulates more complaints than a slow-selling one with the same defect rate, and NHTSA complaints are self-reported by owners, not verified defects. Treat this list as a map of where owner-reported trouble is concentrated, and read the per-year breakdown before ruling a car out.
Journalists and writers are welcome to reference this data with a link back to the source:
CarWizz, “The worst used car model years to buy,” July 2026. https://car-wizz.com/studies/worst-used-car-model-years