What breaks on the car you’re about to buy

What the mileage figure adds

Complaint counts cannot be compared between models, because NHTSA records how many people complained but not how many cars were sold. The mileage at which a part failed does not need that denominator: it is measured inside each model’s own reports, so “the power train is reported failing around 90,000 miles on this one and around 50,000 on that one” is a comparison that holds — between cars of the same model year, which have had the same time on the road to accumulate miles.

That figure is on every page here, broken down by component, with the middle half of the reports shown around the median. Read about the data for how it is computed and what it does not mean.

Model years covered

276 pages, 20 makes, model years 2010–2016. A model year appears when it has at least 300 complaints on file and a recorded mileage on at least half of them. Data retrieved September 12, 2026.

Nothing matches that. Clear the box to see all 276 model years.

What the data can’t tell you

Statistics describe a population of cars. They cannot tell you about the one car in the seller’s driveway. That is what the inspection checklist on each page is for: it was written and checked by someone who does this work on their own cars, and the data decides only which checks are listed first.

The checklists are deliberately cautious in their wording. A checklist that talks you out of a sound car is worse than no checklist at all.